Archive of Our Own

In his defense, when Shane inevitably fucks everything up, he doesn’t realize it is about to happen. For the most part, everything seems completely normal. He arrives at Ilya’s door twenty minutes before the first period starts, which is just enough time for Ilya to let him in, back him up against the hallway wall and kiss him sweetly before muttering, ”Help me finish up dinner.” Shane reluctantly removes his hands from where he’d gripped Ilya’s bare waist under his tank top and helps. He sits at the kitchen island and chops up cucumbers and tomatoes for the salad, and only teases Ilya a little about the slightly too-crisped-up chicken when he takes it out of the oven.

”First rule of date night is to not make fun of the person cooking for you, Hollander,” Ilya says, shooting him a glance over his shoulder.

”Pretty sure it doesn’t count if you make the other person also do the cooking,” Shane says.

”Making a salad is barely cooking,” Ilya tells him with an offhand gesture, like he’s shooing away a fly. ”And is just for you, anyway.”

”Yes, because it would kill you to eat a vegetable, I know.”

Ilya takes two plates out of the cupboard. ”Ah, well.” He turns to Shane again and raises a suggestive eyebrow. ”But I have to leave room for dessert, no?”

Shane feels himself, stupidly, go red in the face. Whatever expression he must be wearing makes Ilya grin.

They eat their food in the living room, plates precariously placed on the low coffee table. Ilya turns down the volume of the sports channel where the commentators are already gearing up for the game and nonchalantly says, ”Betting 3-1 for Pittsburgh.”

Too low, Shane thinks. ”No way.” He shakes his head. ”Hakola’s been playing on a fucked knee, and Colorado’s defense has been clicking lately anyway. They’ll score more than that.”

Ilya lets himself sink further into the couch cushions and angles his body closer towards Shane’s. ”Fine, loser,” he says, like Shane hasn’t had each player’s stats seared into the back of his eyelids for months and each team’s winning odds analyzed three times over. ”Better start thinking about what you’ll give me when I win.”

That’s when it happens, Shane thinks. He looks at the last few rays of sunlight weaving through Ilya’s hair where they’re falling through the blinds that Shane had half-lowered the last time he was here and that Ilya hadn’t bothered raising back up, at the casual sprawl of his limbs, at the fading bite mark, high on Ilya’s neck, that Shane intimately recognizes, and an answer echoes easily in the back of his head, a simple, quiet, all of it. Anything, Shane thinks, I’d give you anything you want.

And then he thinks, very clearly, oh no.

*

A little over a year before, as Shane was making his way back to their booth with his second beer of the night in hand, Rose, who’d been pushing her own way through the crowd from the opposite direction, presumably to get another drink herself, lay a hand on his shoulder and leaned in close enough to half-shout in a warning, ”You’re about to get ambushed.”

She sent him an apologetic wince as she squeezed past. Shane hadn’t understood what it meant until he slid back into his seat at their table in the furthest-tucked-away corner of the room and the next second, Hayden was pulling his phone out, opening Instagram and saying, ”So, listen.”

He understood then that he should have stayed home.

”Hayd,” Shane said, ”no.”

”I haven’t even said anything yet,” Hayden protested to that. He started scrolling, thumb flicking up, up. Shane couldn’t help but track the movement; it was like watching a car crash — when you knew something terrible was about to happen but kept your eyes trained on the trajectory of it anyway — except on a micro scale.

”Good,” Shane told him, a little snidely. ”Let’s keep it that way.” Hayden’s thumb stopped; Shane, released from the spell of the motion, turned his eyes down onto his beer.

When Shane had come out, he’d foolishly hoped all the setting him up with random people from various social media platforms would stop. That had not been the case. As if to assure Shane that his being gay did not change anything and he was as loved and supported as ever, which Shane had never doubted in the first place, Jackie had simply transitioned from cherry-picking yoga instructors and kindergarten teachers to male yoga instructors, or part-time baristas, or, on one notable occasion, a semi-professional figure skater. Hayden had remained her accomplice throughout the ordeal. He had seemed apologetic about it, though not enough to cut it short.

”Wow, man, don’t shoot the messenger,” he said, which, case in point. He seemed to have found what he’d been looking for, proceeding to shove his phone right under Shane’s nose. Shane precariously covered the top of his glass with his hand, remembering last year’s incident with Hayden’s iPhone and his gin tonic. He squinted at the screen, too bright in the corner of this godforsaken bar. ”Look, it’s a hot guy. Objectively.”

A marathon runner this time. Shane politely slid his gaze from the photo of the guy holding up a medal to a photo of him mid-stride in a park to a photo of him and what looked like some other avid runner dousing themselves with water straight from their water bottles. He counted an appropriate amount of time — seven seconds — before saying, ”Cool,” and turning back to his beer to take a sip. It tasted a little flat.

”He’s hot, right?” Hayden said, sounding hopeful. ”I mean, come on.”

”I guess.”

”You guess?” Shane shrugged, which only made Hayden lean further into his space, like he could pry a better answer out of Shane with the sheer force of proximity. ”Dude, give me something.”

”I’m not into runners.”

This elicited an incredulous sound out of Hayden. ”You’ve gone running every single morning without fail since I met you.”

In an attempt to steer the conversation onto safer waters, he asked, ”How does Jackie keep finding all these people anyway?”

”She’s talented like that.” But the diversion attempt hadn’t worked. Hayden clicked into the water-soaked picture and began scrolling down. ”But seriously, what’s wrong with Mr Marathon over here? He’s good-looking and athletic and outgoing, why not?”

Shane’s first mistake was, he supposed, ever agreeing for Jackie to set him up with someone in the first place. He hadn’t needed it; she had insisted anyway, shoving little baby Amber into Shane’s arms and immediately digging into her pocket for her phone as they sat together on the back porch one early summer afternoon and listened to Hayden yell after Ruby to slow down, goddamn, from where he had been chasing her in circles around the backyard. Amber had gurgled happily when Shane cradled her closer to his chest. Her head fit in the palm of his hand like a doll’s. ”Oh my god, Shane, I know just the guy for you,” Jackie’d told him, and Shane had nodded indulgently, although all he’d wanted to do was to close his eyes like little Amber did, turn away into a warmer, safer place.

He’d gone on one date with the single dad Jackie had shown him photos of that afternoon. He’d gone on a few others, with other people. None of them had stuck, because Shane was—too busy, not quite the right fit, not quite interested, but Jackie refused to give up. Alas.

”You date him if you like him so much,” Shane said and then, just as Hayden opened his mouth to respond, a hand snatched his phone right out of his grip. Shane covered the top of his beer glass again.

”Who is that, Pike,” Ilya Rozanov asked, squeezing himself onto the seat next to Shane. ”The guy your wife tells you not to worry about?”

Ilya spawned out of thin air with five shots of what looked like pure vodka balanced carefully on a tray; the alcohol spilled a little as he set it on the table. He grinned at the affronted fuck you, give me my phone back from Hayden and then directed the same grin at Shane. His hair gleamed damp on his temples; he pressed the whole side of his body to Shane’s when he slid into the booth, hot from shoulder to hip, close, then closer when Hayden launched himself across Shane in a valiant attempt to wrench his phone out of Ilya’s grip. ”Why are you bullying Hollander again?”

”Fuck off, asshole,” Hayden said, which only made Ilya’s grin widen. ”I’m not bullying anybody. We’re talking, and you are interrupting.”

”Then why is he making that face?”

”What face,” Shane said.

”Your I’m getting bullied face,” Ilya told him, looking pleased. ”My favourite.”

Shane flipped him off and, in an attempt to get rid of whatever it was his face was doing, took another sip of his beer.

When Rose and Svetlana had started dating, a few months back, their friend groups had morphed together like pieces of one of those lanky, paper Christmas tree ornaments that Shane had made back in second grade in arts and crafts and that his mom had, for some reason, kept to this day. They were all only haphazardly linked, like the little paper loops, a bit misshapen despite eight-year-old Shane’s best efforts; still, they held together anyway. Rose had Shane, and Shane had Hayden, and then Svetlana had swept Rose off her feet, and wherever Svetlana was, there was also Ilya Rozanov. Shane didn’t—mind him, really. It would be a lie to say he did. Just—

”Hayden’s trying to set me up on a date,” Shane heard himself say then, for whatever fucking reason. The beer must have gotten to him, surely. Or the pub’s too loud techno fucking anthems had made him temporarily delirious. Or he’d been spending too much time around Rose.

”What?” Ilya said, looking from Shane to Hayden and back to Shane. His smile took on a new, delighted quality. ”This is not the boring table I was promised when I got here.”

”Oh, no, it is,” Shane was quick to correct, which made Ilya bark out a laugh and Hayden call out in protest. ”I’m not going on any date.”

”You could at least try, man,” Hayden fucking started again. This had been a mistake. Shane resisted, very strongly, to roll his eyes and focused instead on where Ilya had picked up one of the tiny vodka glasses off the tray and was tracing along the rim with a finger in small, slow circles. ”It’s a hot dude, and it would make Jackie so happy if you finally had someone. Both of us, actually.”

”I love you guys, I really do,” Shane said, ”but you seriously don’t know when to stop.”

”Clearly,” Ilya said to this, nodding solemnly, ”is why they have forty children.”

In the end, Shane was saved from Hayden attempting to scratch Ilya’s eyes out by Rose and Svetlana sauntering up to the table with their lipsticks smudged and their arms wound loosely around each other. Rose had not been going up to the bar to get herself a drink after all, then. Svetlana only edged away from her enough to sweep up one of the vodka shots off the tray, and Ilya had picked up his, and they both threw them back with ease.

”To Hollander’s love life,” Ilya said smugly, setting his glass down with a clink. Shane considered informing him that toasts were supposed to be made before drinking, not after, but then Ilya bumped their shoulders together, and when Shane turned to look at him, he found Ilya’s eyes already meeting his. The heat in the pub had made the skin of Ilya’s throat glisten with sweat; the traces of the cologne he must have used clung to his collar. His Adam’s apple moved as he swallowed. The chain around his neck gleamed momentarily, dipping lower into the V of his shirt, under it.

”I hope you choke on the next one,” Shane told him and only shuffled closer a fraction.

“No way,” Ilya replied, “this is like water to me.” In the shitty pub light, his pupils looked huge.

Rose giggled sharply, up from where her face had been half-buried in Svetlana’s hair. Shane let his gaze slide off of Ilya, but Rose didn’t seem to notice the half-second delay he’d needed to do so; she only sent him another apologetic smile. ”I did try to warn you,” she said. ”Who is it this time, a competitive swimmer?”

”A marathon runner,” Shane said, the very same moment Ilya swung his eyes away from Shane, onto Hayden and back again, and clicked his tongue with a fake-pleading, ”Rose, don’t give him more ideas.”

Hayden whacked Ilya on the head this time, snarling another fuck you, and then, when Shane shot him a warning glance to stave off another childish fucking shoving match between those two, he saw that Hayden pulled up Instagram on his phone, but this time to sulk, or scroll through pictures of his wonderful, nosy hobbyist-matchmaker wife to calm himself down.

And then, incredulously, Shane’s biggest ally of this whole goddamn night turned out to be Svetlana. ”You’re hardly in a position to make fun of Shane’s love life, Ilyusha,” he heard her say from where she and Rose were still standing next to their table, swaying slightly to the music. The shot glass in Svetlana’s hand glimmered like a gemstone. ”You wouldn’t be able to make a relationship work to save your life.”

She blinked good-naturedly at Shane as she said this, like they shared a secret, and then rolled her eyes at Ilya’s affronted answer of, ”That is not true.”

”It is,” she said. Her thumb swiped over the exposed skin of Rose’s waist, up, down, up over the cutout in her dress, and then she leaned down to place the shot glass back on the sticky table tray. ”Remember the pilates instructor? Or the influencer girl? You didn’t even last a month. Or this actress that stopped texting you back after literally the first—”

And then Shane stopped listening because he felt Ilya slide a hand up his thigh, very, very slowly, under the table where no one could see.

Shane stilled, then consciously swallowed his stillness down. He felt a sensation zip down his spine, like a condensed full-body shudder that ended exactly where Ilya’s palm had pressed into Shane’s leg. The pub’s thumping, headache-inducing bass faded out then, slightly. He knew no one was looking; it was too dark; Hayden was still sulking into his phone; Rose and Svetlana were mostly only interested in each other. Shane briefly closed his eyes against the flashing lights, took another sip of his beer, then another, then another. He shifted against the back of the booth; his thigh had pressed against Ilya’s, firm. Ilya’s hand inched up again. Shane felt his fingers trace the inseam of his jeans. His knees parted, on their own accord, a bit further.

Yeah. Yeah. It would be a lie to say he minded Ilya Rozanov much.

”This is slander,” he heard Ilya say, suddenly back at full volume. He opened his eyes to find him sporting a disgruntled expression; he looked, somehow, both unimpressed and wronged. ”I might as well just go home at this point, no? No fun, sitting in bar with such liars.”

From above the too-bright screen of his phone, Hayden muttered, ”Godspeed, dude.”

”Pike is praying now, even.” Shane did a poor job of suppressing his snort at that and then pretended not to feel Hayden’s betrayed look on the side of his head. ”I know you’ll miss me, Pike, but I promise—”

”To die in a ditch? Thanks.”

”I know it is hard, always feeling like dumb loser around a delight like me.”

”Wow, who’s really the liar here?”

”Okay, okay.” Rose momentarily untangled herself from her girlfriend, putting a hand out. ”How about we go to the club next door, maybe dance?” She swept up another shot from the tray, threw it back in one go and placed the glass back on the table. She looked flushed and happy. She blinked at Shane, smiled encouragingly, as if Shane had ever danced in his life and enjoyed it.

”I’m beat,” he said. He felt hot, his pulse a half-beat too quick, like he just came back from the dance floor anyway. ”Maybe you can convince our resident matchmaker here.”

Ilya’s fingers twitched on Shane’s thigh. His palm felt heavy, a burning pressure. ”You’re heading out, too?”

Like Ilya didn’t know already. ”Yeah, uh.” Up, down, up. The brush of his thumb. Shane swallowed. ”Yes.”

”Cool,” Ilya said. Rose made a disappointed sound from somewhere above; Hayden grumbled a response; the floor-shaking bass pouring out from the pub speakers transitioned into something more mellow, slower. ”Wanna share the Uber?”

”Sure,” Shane said and felt Ilya grip his thigh stronger, just for a breath, before he lifted his hand away.

*

The bout of realization induces a quiet internal panic in Shane that he stuffs into a neat little box and pushes to the back of his head and only lets himself examine late at night when he’s staring into the dark of his bedroom.

It is fine. He blinks against the fluorescent digits of the alarm clock he’d gotten for his birthday when he was ten and kept on his nightstand ever since, and thinks, intensely, again, it’s fine. Shane can be normal about this. It is scary, but it’s okay to admit it here, where he’s alone and where it’s dark and where no one will see whatever expression he might be wearing, no one will know that he’s been tossing in bed for hours. The thread count of his bedsheets is high enough, usually, except tonight they grate at his skin. His pillow smells like Ilya’s shampoo, a souvenir from the last time he was here.

The sudden magnitude of what he feels for Ilya pushes the air out of his lungs, like he’s getting slammed into the boards of an ice rink. But it is his fault for feeling something when he wasn’t supposed to, so he keeps his stubborn eyes open and tries to cup whatever it is stirring in him into his hands and hold it up to the light to examine, to see better in the faint fluorescent alarm clock glow.

In his childhood home, a tiny one-bedroom apartment with ugly kitchen tiles and a narrow hallway that his parents moved them out of when Shane was seven, there was always a bowl of candy on the dresser by the front door. ”For the guests”, his mom would tell him, like their home was a dentist’s office. Shane has always been good with rules but he was also a kid; sometimes, he’d sneak down the hallway when his parents were in the other room watching TV or busy making dinner and he’d grab a piece of candy and stuff it in his pocket and try not to let his glee show, and it’d feel good — snatching something just for himself right under the watchful eye of the world. He thinks maybe that’s what this is.

Shane is aware, to a degree, that it must cost Ilya something to keep this thing between them going. A good chunk of his social life, probably, and a whole lot of pleasant, carefree hookups that are far more fun than Shane must be, with his nagging about Ilya’s awful fucking smoking or sugar intake, or with his strong opinions about laundry detergent and protein powder and the proper way to vacuum a carpet. Ilya calls him boring all the time for a reason; back when this first started and Shane had asked him to be careful and not compromise their absurd fucking arrangement with a stray hookup lounging in his bed or feeling him up at a club where someone could see — which had been the extend to which they’d discussed it — Ilya had called him boring, too. It’s fine; he’s been called that before.

But he also recognizes that the boring is, at this point, laced with affection. That whatever he has going on seems to be working for Ilya, and maybe it’s just that it is more convenient to have one steady person to fuck than having to look for others, but maybe—

Maybe it’s wishful thinking. Maybe it’s not. Shane cannot read people like everyone else seems to be able to. It is easier with Ilya, because Ilya is honest and straightforward and wonderful, but sometimes it’s still hard to tell with him, too. Sometimes, if Shane wants to get an answer, he still has to ask the question.  

The clock ticks over, when he looks, to 2:40AM.

In the end, he supposes, he isn’t as unaffected as he thought he would be. His hand reaches for his phone on the nightstand before he fully realizes what he’s doing. When he taps into the text thread with Ilya, he sees that the last message there is some stupid meme Ilya sent him that he only reacted to with a thumbs down. It makes him smile into his pillow.

Do you wanna meet this week, he sends before he can think better of it, then sets his phone back down on the nightstand, screen down, so that he doesn’t check for a response like a fool.

*

Around ten months ago, Shane just got out of a very dull meeting with management when his phone lit up with a message. Treadmill Trish just canceled, it said. Come over later))

Shane reacted with a thumbs-up emoji, which was perfectly reasonable and not something only old people used, despite what Ilya kept saying. I’ll be there at 6.

He had found Ilya’s nicknames for his personal training clients insulting at first, until he’d found out they all knew Ilya called them these. ”Because they have a sense of humour, unlike you,” Ilya had informed him. Treadmill Trish was a middle-aged lady who apparently paid Ilya to stand there for an hour and watch her run. Shane had asked Ilya once, dumbly, what nickname he would get if he were a client, which he blamed on the fact that Ilya had made him come untouched all over his own poor duvet shortly before that. His head was still spinning a little.”Hot Hollander,” Ilya had told him unabashedly, winking, stretched out next to him. His face was flushed, lips bitten red. Shane snorted but felt pleased with the alliteration, until Ilya added, ”Or boring. Both could work.”

He got to Ilya’s at 6PM sharp. Right before he knocked at the door, he put his phone in do not disturb.

Ilya, as he usually did, wasted no time tugging Shane down the hallway, pulling off his own shirt halfway there. He waited graciously as Shane shrugged off his clothes and folded them neatly, then pounced the second he got on the bed. It would have been embarrassing, really, how quickly he got Shane splayed open and trembling under his hands if Shane had the presence of mind to focus on such things. As it was, he was soon too busy making small panting noises right into Ilya’s mouth and clenching around his fingers, two, then three, to worry. Ilya liked him desperate. ”Please fuck me,” he breathed, which earned him a bitten-off curse and an expert twist of Ilya’s wrist that made his thighs shake.

”Da, yes,” Ilya said. ”Since you’re asking so nicely.”

They fucked with Ilya’s face pressed into Shane’s neck and fingers digging into his thigh. Shane moaned right into his ear, high-strung, his cock rubbing against Ilya’s abs with their every move. His nails left scorching red lines down Ilya’s back as he came, which he only noticed as he was walking back from the bathroom, after. He dug out his phone out of the pocket of his pants to check for an Uber — then, when he mindlessly switched off the do not disturb, a flood of Instagram notifications filled his screen. They were all from Hayden. Each one was a new guy Shane did not want to date.

”Fuck,” he muttered to himself and saw out the corner of his eye that Ilya, still lounging on the bed, turned towards him at the sound. ”Fucking matchmaking.”

He very ostensibly locked his phone without opening a single one of his Instagram messages. When he looked at Ilya, there was a curious look on his face. ”They’re still sending you these guys?” he said, apparently having remembered the issue.

”Yes, unfortunately,” Shane said. Annoyance made his voice curt. ”I wish they didn’t.”

He got dressed, made an attempt to fix his hair and was halfway through ordering an Uber after all when Ilya, back in his underwear but nothing else than that, said, ”So. I was thinking.”

”Uh-oh,” Shane said.

”Shut up.” Ilya sat up straighter in bed. His abs flexed as he did so, which made Shane’s eyes stumble on their way up his body, to his face, the mess of his hair. ”You know how Sveta always says I cannot keep a date around, how we have a bet?”

Shane had not been aware they had a bet going. Still, he said, ”Yeah?”

”Is very high stakes,” Ilya informed him. ”I would like to win, of course. Have someone date you for at least six months, and I will never question your relationship skills again, she says. And she would buy me good Russian vodka.”

”You bet her for alcohol?”

”Is very hard to find in Canada,” Ilya said, long-suffering. Shane scoffed.

”Okay, then go and date someone,” he said.

”I could have anyone, you are right,” Ilya told him, though that was not what Shane said at all. He got up from the bed in one smooth motion, stretching, cat-like; the unimpressed look Shane sent him faltered, maybe, at that. Just a little. ”But it is hard to date, and I am busy. So I thought, since Pike keeps pestering you also.” He came up to Shane, stopping within arm's reach. ”We could pretend.”

Which was the most ridiculous thing Ilya had told him to date, and that was saying a lot, given who Ilya generally was. ”Are you fucking kidding.”

”Think about it,” Ilya said. He sounded like it was reasonable, which it wasn’t. ”You would be off the hook with Pike. I would win the bet and would also be off the hook with Sveta. We already have mutual friends, and you are gay, and I am hot.” He rolled his admittedly ridiculous shoulders. ”Everyone would believe.”

”We would be lying to our friends,” Shane told him venomously.

”Is small lie. No harm, yes?” Ilya shrugged. ”And we are already lying. They don’t know that all I need is text and polite, boring Shane Hollander comes over to suck my dick.”

”Oh my god, fuck off,” Shane said, face burning. Like they hadn’t just had sex in this very room. Like they hadn’t been sleeping with each other for months at this point. ”Are you even hearing yourself? You want to date, then I’m sure someone will come around sooner or later, though I couldn’t imagine why they’d like you, asshole.”

Ilya chuckled, like Shane insulting him to his face was fun. ”Yes,” he said, leaning closer, gripping Shane’s jaw so he could turn his head and mouth at where Shane’s pulse had been going too fast. ”But you’re already here. We’re already fucking. What’s the problem to kiss you in front of our friends when I already do it in private?” When he leaned away, it felt like a physical loss. ”Is the easiest solution. We already get along so well.”

When they had first met, it had been clear from the very beginning that they weren’t going to get along. The first thing Shane had said to Ilya, in front of the local ice rink entrance, before he’d even known who he was, had been, ”Excuse me, I don’t think smoking’s allowed in this area,” to which Ilya had only reacted with a raised eyebrow, a pointed look at Shane and a deliberate slow drag of the cigarette pinched between his fingers. His cheeks hollowed as he breathed the smoke in; the lines of his face looked sharp. ”Ah,” he’d said, and the smoke then curled around his mouth like a caress, ”too bad.”

It had been Rose’s idea to meet at the ice rink — a place picked in Shane’s favour, he had guessed, to put him at ease, just so he could finally be introduced to Svetlana now that she’d finally become Rose’s official girlfriend after what Shane knew had to be weeks of increasingly desperate flirting. Rose had kept Shane up to date with her love life, though he’d been of little help. Shane hadn’t even known that Ilya was the elusive ”friend of Sveta’s” that Rose had mentioned in passing until the girls had arrived, together, and Svetlana had laid a neatly manicured hand on Ilya’s shoulder, saying, ”Ilyusha, this is Rose’s friend I’ve been telling you about.”

Shane had twitched and sent her a confused look over Rose’s shoulder, where she’d been crushing him in a hug. As she’d released him, Rose’d said, ”Shane, this is Svetlana,” gesturing, ”and I thought, the more the merrier, right? So, this is Ilya. He and Sveta are childhood friends.”

Shane had packed all the hatred he’d harboured for surprises like these in the look he’d directed at her. He did not, however, want to come off as rude in front of Svetlana or her cancer-stick-enjoying friend, so he’d let Rose’s repentant little smile slide. ”Uh, hi,” he’d said. ”Nice to meet you. I’m Shane.”

Ilya’d shot him a look. ”You skate?”

Shane had adjusted the strap of the sports bag on his shoulder. He’d said, in lieu of a better reply, ”I’m Canadian, so.”

Ilya had nodded then, taking another drag. Shane had to suppress the absolutely ridiculous urge to bat the cigarette out of his hand. Ilya had long fingers, bony knuckles, strong wrists. ”So you are polite boy,” he’d said. His eyes had swept down the whole length of Shane’s body. ”Good. Means you won’t get too offended when I am the better skater.”

”I wasn’t aware we’d be competing,” he’d said. Svetlana had clicked her tongue and muttered something low and foreign at Ilya; he’d kept his eyes on Shane. Shane had hitched the bag strap higher on his shoulder and added, compelled by some strange urge he hadn’t recognized, ”But I am polite, so I won’t even laugh at you when you lose."

Satisfaction had slowly spilled over Ilya’s face like ink bleeding onto a page from a faulty pen. He’d put out his cigarette. ”Okay,” he’d muttered, flashing Shane a hint of teeth, ”let’s see.”

They had ended up terrorizing half of the public skating rink, too busy trying to one-up each other to notice much else. Rose and Svetlana had been holding hands and skating in lazy circles; Shane and Ilya had spent their allotted skating time — before an unimpressed staff member had asked them to behave, which immediately mortified Shane into submission — racing each other down the rink, and then seeing who would be faster skating backwards. Ilya had poked fun at Shane’s completely acceptable edge control; Shane had, in turn, made sure to spray Ilya with ice every chance he got when he’d stop in his vicinity.

”Like kids,” Svetlana had commented as they were packing their skates up, but she’d smiled at Shane as she said it.

He’d left the skating rink with his desire for Ilya Rozanov already trailing behind him like a stray dog, apprehensive but stubborn. It had been of little use that he’d tried to keep it bundled closely with annoyance, especially when Rose had bullied him into the next group outing and there Ilya Rozanov was again. Shane had felt his eyes on him for the whole duration of that evening. By the end of it, when Rozanov had cornered him and nonchalantly offered Shane come over — I live close by, have some very good alcohol at my place — he’d been helpless to say yes.

He had wondered, on his way to Ilya’s apartment, during a slightly awkward lull in their stilted conversation, if that was one of those things people just did and he never caught up on. Was it normal to just come over to a random guy’s place to—? He’d sent a quick text to Rose telling her he’d left because she wasn’t around to see them go. And then he was stepping through the threshold of Ilya’s place and slipping his shoes off and he’d barely had enough time to complement the high ceilings before Ilya’s hands had been on him, and then his mouth.

He’d almost come right there in the hallway, clinging to Ilya’s shoulders and biting at his lips, just from Ilya slipping a hand down his pants and palming him through his briefs; it had been made a little more bearable when he’d sunk to his knees and only got his mouth on Ilya for a few moments before Ilya had weaved a hand through his hair and tugged him upwards, voice sounding unsteady as he said, ”Okay, okay, bedroom.” They hadn’t fucked that night, but Ilya did take him very carefully apart with his incredible fucking tongue and then had come onto the crease of Shane’s hip and thigh, breath stuttering. He’d left a trail of wet, hot kisses up the stretch of Shane’s torso, ending with a bite to his peck, which forced a ragged sound right out of Shane’s throat. ”Incredible,” Ilya had mused. His fingers flexed on Shane’s waist.

”Could you,” Shane had said in response, ”not tell anyone about this.”

He had been out at this point, but freshly. It still felt weird, talking about this part of himself to other people, like the whole thing had been a crisp-green flower and he was trying to pick a leaf off of it, uncomfortable in a quiet, raw way. It was odd to just peel back his old habits and tell people about his sexuality in this straight-forward, offhand way others seemed so practiced in and Shane did not feel like he was capable of; it would be truly fucking mind-boggling, then, to bring Ilya Rozanov into it, admit to the heat coiling in the pit of his stomach when he barely knew the guy, to how quick the very same guy made him hard, made him come.

”What, you do not want to share?” Ilya had said, mouthing at Shane’s chest. But he must have seen something in Shane’s face when he flicked his gaze upwards, because he had followed with, ”Is fine, I will not tell. We’re just having fun, yes?”

Shane had felt relief course through his system like a drug; then, it had been followed very closely by a full-body shiver when Ilya licked lazily at Shane’s nipple. ”Yes,” he’d said, cupping the back of Ilya’s head with his palm. ”It’s just this once, anyway.”

”Hm,” Ilya had hummed and then smiled, visibly pleased, when Shane had twitched at the nip of his teeth, ”maybe.”

Obviously, it had not stopped at only just the once. Shane had no way of knowing it then, but he felt, in Ilya’s bedroom again, still warm from the residual pleasure of his recent orgasm and Ilya’s scorching touch, much like he’d felt back then — about to make a choice that was not the most reasonable, something that felt like it’d follow him.

”Just a few months,” he heard himself say, haltingly.

Ilya’s eyes sparkled. ”Yes.”

”And you will behave, Rozanov.”

”I always behave, Hollander.” He shoved at Ilya’s shoulder at this. Ilya caught his wrist and held on. He was grinning. ”It’s going to be fine. No big deal, yes?”

No big deal. Right. ”Just to get Hayden to leave me alone,” Shane muttered. Ilya nodded but didn’t make a comment about Hayden this time, which Shane appreciated, actually. And then he said, ”Fine, you’ll win your stupid bet,” and twisted his wrist out of Ilya’s grip. ”Let’s try.”

*

Ilya calls Shane just before 9AM the next day, which is early for him.

”Is Sleeping Beauty suffering from insomnia?” is the first thing he says, because he still believes he is funny and also knows how passionate Shane is about sleep cycles and his nightly eight hours.

”Good morning to you, too,” Shane says and traps the phone between his ear and his shoulder as he undoes his seatbelt. ”Fucker."

The quiet noise Ilya makes at that is what Shane is after. ”Morning,” he says easily. His voice still carries the scratchy quality it only really has right after Ilya wakes up. Shane doesn’t really have time to sit around in his car, given his shift starts in three minutes, but maybe he can afford to be a bit late today if it means he’ll get to listen to the scratch in Ilya’s voice just for a moment longer. ”Though I think my morning is better than yours, considering you probably slept, what, five hours?”

”Four,” Shane admits. ”I went for a run before breakfast.”

”Of course you did,” Ilya says. His r’s always sound harsher in the mornings, like the sunlight gradually thaws his accent the longer he is up. ”You are not a reasonable man.”

”I think you are maybe the first person ever to say that to me.”

”I stand by it.”

”Yeah, I know, not unusual for you to be wrong about something.”

”Look who’s talking.” There is a sound from the other end, a clink of something against stone; he imagines Ilya, still mussed from sleep, sitting at his kitchen island with a cup of coffee in hand. Then, his voice gets softer when he asks, ”Everything okay?”

Shane shifts in his seat. ”Yeah,” he says. When he sighs, he wonders if it carries over the connection. ”I just couldn’t sleep.”

”So you lay in your bed and thought about me instead,” Ilya hums. ”You thought, oh, I miss Ilya, I wish I could see him. Yes? I wish he was here. I will text to let him know. He is so hot and sexy and nice, I wish he was here to touch—”

”Shut up, that’s not what I thought at all.” Not in so many words anyway. But he can’t tell Ilya this. ”I just wanted to see if you had time. This week.”

”Not much. Is tragic, I am too good at my job, and too many people want me. So is nice that we planned earlier, anyway,” Ilya tells him. There is a pause, like he is waiting for a response; when it doesn’t come, he follows with, ”On Friday, Shane. Remember? Rose’s birthday?”

Shit. ”Right. Yeah, you’re right, fuck.”

”Did you forget, Hollander?” He can tell what expression Ilya’s wearing just from how he sounds; sees his raised eyebrows in his mind’s eye, the upturned line of his mouth. ”You? Mr To-do list?”

”I didn’t forget,” Shane tells him. The gift Rose wanted from Shane this year, as she told him, was for Shane to finally agree to a double date with her and Svetlana. Shane has had the date marked in two separate calendars in his phone for months, Outlook and Google, as well as circled in a physical calendar hanging by his desk at work. How could he forget? ”I just didn’t realize it was this week already.”

”I will tell Rose about this,” Ilya informs him. ”Maybe this will finally be the thing that makes her like me more than you.”

Shane snorts despite himself. ”You’re ridiculous.”

”Ah, but it made you laugh,” Ilya tells him. He sounds proud of himself. ”That’s what I wanted.”

Shane feels something light up inside him at that like a firefly, small and bright and lively. Ilya really is ridiculous, sitting in his kitchen, freshly woken up, bickering with Shane about late-night text messages and slip-ups in his schedule just to hear him laugh through the phone. The thought of it floods him with a sensation he doesn’t recognize, something that fills him with warmth but also, stupidly, makes his eyes sting. He leans forward in his seat, very slowly, until his forehead rests against the top of the steering wheel, and carefully doesn’t blink.

”Shane,” Ilya says, his voice softer again. ”What’s wrong?”

I want to be with you, Shane almost tells him. Everything you’ve been pretending to feel, I want you to feel for real. Sometimes I think you are maybe the most beautiful person I’ve ever met. I looked at you one afternoon and realized I would give you everything I could, that all you'd have to do is ask me. Won’t you ask me?

”Nothing,” he says instead, once he finds his voice. It only takes him two tries. He hopes Ilya doesn’t notice. ”Sorry, I’m just—having a weird day.”

”Friday is going to be okay,” Ilya assures him, apparently interpreting his strange mood as a bout of anxiety. He’s not too far off. ”We will have some fun with the girls, and then I can say enough, ladies, I need my boyfriend all to myself now, and we can leave early and go home. My place or yours, whatever you prefer. Does that sound good?”

It’s not fair, how much he wants from Ilya. Sweet, considerate Ilya, who loves their friends so much, who makes sure Shane is comfortable, who is ready to make excuses just so Shane doesn’t get anxious. He keeps letting Shane steal his t-shirts when Shane stays over. Last week, he stayed up kissing Shane goodnight for so long he could barely keep his eyes open by the end. Sometimes, when he gets quiet, he lies down with his head in Shane’s lap and lets him run his hands through his hair, gently twist it around his fingers strand by strand, because that is the only way Shane has found that doesn’t make it frizz.

”Yeah,” Shane says quietly. He sounds weak to his own ears when he asks, ”Can we watch hockey highlights?”

”Yes, solnyshko,” Ilya says, the smile audible in his voice, warming it up like sunlight, and it is Shane, then, who has to hang up, because he is already late and because Ilya refuses to do it, keeps saying, ”No, you first,” like he, too, wants to keep talking, like he wants to keep listening to Shane’s voice as much as Shane does to his.

*

When Shane had told Hayden he was dating Ilya, Hayden had almost choked to death on a fry. Rose took it a whole lot better. Her eyes went huge, and she leaned over her half-full glass of wine and said with barely contained excitement, ”Oh my god, Shane. He’s so hot.”

Because Rose was one of the two people in Shane’s life he’d felt comfortable enough about his sexuality around to actually discuss it — the second one being Ilya, but in a wildly different, blush-inducing way — he only felt a little embarrassed when he said, ”I know.”

She proceeded to try and wheedle out of him how it all happened. ”When did it start?” she asked, and ”Who started it?” and ”I bet he’s a great kisser,” to which Shane replied, ”Not long ago,” and ”He did, I guess,” and, ducking his head, ”Yes.” He’d prepared himself for this inevitable round of questioning from Rose. What he hadn’t expected was when, halfway through her plate of shrimp, she sighed happily and said, ”We could do a double date,” and Shane snapped his head up from his trout like he’d just gotten electrocuted.

That was a mortifying concept. Shane knew how to operate around Ilya in a friend group environment and he knew what to do when they were fucking, but him and Ilya on a date — with Rose and, incriminatingly, Svetlana, who still mildly intimidated Shane with her elegant gestures and elite hockey knowledge and eyes that sometimes seemed so piercing he almost believed she could see through concrete or something — was uncharted territory. He somehow managed to defer Rose’s idea with excuses about things between him and Ilya still being fresh; she accepted it.

”Besides, I know Sveta scares you a little,” she added, to which Shane spluttered, ”but fine. Keep him to yourself for now.” Then she shook her head. ”I just hope he knows how lucky he is to have you.”

The next day, he informed Ilya he’d be coming over and then sat him down and presented the problem at hand. Ilya, from the other side of the couch, only raised a sceptical eyebrow.

”So what?” he said, the asshole, like Shane hadn’t lost hours of sleep the night before over this. ”Sveta likes you very much, she would not try to make you uncomfortable. She thinks you are very handsome,” he nudged Shane’s knee with his foot, ”and that you’re also very good skater, which, only one of these is true, but—”

”It doesn’t matter that she wouldn’t make me uncomfortable.” Shane nudged Ilya’s socked foot back, with more force, feeling subtly vicious all of a sudden. ”Ilya, if this is going to work, we have to actually get to know each other. Know things. What if she asks what my favourite thing about you is, or something, and I won’t have an answer?”

”You can always say it is my huge dick,” Ilya said. Shane actually shifted on the couch to kick at him. ”Okay, ow— okay! You want to know things, then no problem, Christ.” He gestured, leaning further back into the arm of the couch. ”Ask me.”

That is how Shane got to know, finally, some things about Ilya that were a little more significant than just him never lining up his shoes in the hallway or how he liked his cock sucked. Ilya was from Moscow; he’d known Svetlana since they were children; they used to hook up. ”Girls are fun,” he said, like it was all the explanation needed. Shane wondered if that was why they seemed so comfortable around each other but did not voice it. His chest felt a little tight, briefly, until he took a deep breath.

He had an older brother, though he’d cut off every follow-up question Shane tried to ask about him. There was also a niece and a sister-in-law, but no other family. Ilya hadn’t been to Russia in years. He seemed dodgy around the subject, like it cost him something to talk about it; apart from the mention of his brother, all he said was, ”I don’t think anything good is waiting for me back in that place,” and, a little wistfully, ”but when I was little, I used to play hockey there. I even wanted to go pro for a while.”

”Me too,” Shane said then, the words surprised out of him. ”But then I messed up my knee.” And an eating disorder had grazed him like a bullet; this, he kept to himself. He knew they had both recognized the hockey player in each other back at the ice rink with Rose and Svetlana, though there was little occasion to bring it up since. ”Why didn’t you?”

”My mom died,” Ilya said, followed by another shrug, stiffer than his previous ones, at Shane’s quiet I’m sorry. ”I kind of lost interest after that.”

His birthday was in June. He used to live in Boston but followed Svetlana to Canada when she moved there. He thought Canada was boring but pleasant enough. He knew a lot about cars, and liked to read Russian classics, and his favourite food was pelmeni and a good steak. He got nervous on planes but liked the little plastic cups the airplane drinks were always given out in.

”Wait, are you taking notes?” Shane heard him in the middle of a story about why he always preferred an aisle seat and not a window seat. Shane lifted his head from where he’d been tapping ”opinions about planes” on his phone.

”Yes?” he said. Was this weird? ”I want to make sure I remember.”

From the other side of the couch, Ilya blinked at him. There were a few stilted seconds of silence when they just looked at each other. Then something in Ilya’s face went soft, relaxed, like a ribbon when unwrapping a gift.

”We’re not at school, Hollander,” Ilya said, not unkindly. He nudged Shane with his foot again, then kept it there, pressed to his thigh. ”Tell me something about yourself now.”

*

Given that Shane is predictable, and routine and order him soothe him, he goes grocery shopping to calm himself down. It’s this or rearranging his pantry — he tells himself getting out of the house will do him good, too. ”Getting out of the house means going to a club, Hollander, and not a trip to fucking Loblaws,” Ilya told him once, when Shane let it slip that he’d had a stressful week at work and would rather go browse the fresh produce aisle than stand around at some cigarette-reeking bar like Ilya had been trying to convince him to do. He won back then, anyway, no matter what Ilya said — they went shopping together, and Shane got to show Ilya how to pick the best avocados.

He gets canned tomatoes and dried herbs and some multigrain bread and oat milk, and then regular milk, too, because Ilya likes it better and Shane is running low. Eggs. The bell peppers look nice. He picks up a bag of apples and is in the middle of examining an orange when he hears someone call out his name.

There is a vaguely familiar guy standing across the aisle that smiles when Shane looks up at him, and then he is coming over, and right then it clicks in Shane’s mind that they might have gone out on a date once. Andrew, his name was, or Adam, or fucking— Aaron. Right.

”Nice to see you!” maybe-Aaron says, stopping right in front of the oranges. He is still smiling; his teeth are very white. Shane remembers, vaguely, that he might be a dentist or something, which would explain it. ”How’re you doing?”

”Um, hi,” Shane says. He places the acceptably-looking orange in his basket. ”I’m good. How are you?”

They went out to a bar tucked between a bowling alley and an art shop, with drinks served in tall frosty glasses and a non-ending stream of muted jazz pouring into the room. It was stilted, if Shane is remembering correctly; they didn’t have much in common. They talked about their jobs and families and their love for winter sports, though Shane’s short-lived enthusiasm waned when it turned out Aaron liked cross-country skiing better than hockey. Shane still made sure to laugh at appropriate moments and smiled at the suggestion of a possible second date taking place at a hockey rink.

”I’m great,” Aaron says. ”Busy, but you know how it is.” He makes a nonchalant gesture Shane only blinks against. ”Anyway, never busy enough for grocery shopping, right?” He smiles again. ”Not my usual spot, but my boyfriend lives nearby, and it’s my turn manning the stove tonight, so.”

”Oh,” Shane says. ”Right.”

There was no second date. Shane, halfway home from the bar, got a text from Ilya saying that a friend of his, visiting from Boston, had to leave a day early, and so he now had a free evening. What am I supposed to do about it, Shane wrote back. Forty minutes later, Ilya was in his apartment, kicking off his shoes and shrugging off his jacket. In bed, Shane cupped Ilya’s jaw in his hands and kissed him, very sweetly, for a very long time, and then slithered down his body, slid his jeans and boxers off, took his half-hard cock in his mouth and lazily bobbed his head until Ilya’s tights were shaking under Shane’s hands, until his breath got ragged.

”Fuck, Hollander,” Ilya was saying, carefully twisting a hand in his hair, ”you’re so good, fuck,” and then something else, in Russian, something that Shane could not understand but that shot straight down his spine like a fucking lightning. He made Ilya come easily, taking him all the way to the back of his throat, once, twice, then tonguing at his slit until he spilled on Shane’s tongue.

Ilya, in turn, once he had his breath under control again, pushed Shane flat on his back, hooked his legs over his shoulders and proceeded to eat him out like he’d been waiting all night to do it. Shane could hear his own moans spilling from his lips, the little ah ah ah sounds he made first, then the whimpers he barely recognized from himself when Ilya’s kitten licks turned deeper, slicker, so fucking good he felt light-headed. The low answering hum in Ilya’s throat, as if of approval, made Shane writhe against him, wet and open on his tongue. He was leaking all over his own stomach, his cock untouched, twitching. He wanted to close his thighs around Ilya and keep him between his legs for as long as he’d let him. ”Ilya,” he gasped, trembling, gripping the pillow under his head, ”Ilya, I’m close, I’m—”

Later, he dug out his phone from his pocket, thanked Aaron politely for his time and interest like it had all been a job interview, and went back to bed.

In the grocery store aisle, Aaron keeps Shane busy with friendly questions for a little longer, either choosing to ignore his suddenly red face or chalking it up to a different kind of embarrassment than that caused by reminiscing about incredible sex with another guy. One caused by running into someone you went out with once and never again, maybe. But Shane keeps up the trivial, empty smalltalk until Aaron’s phone rings, blessedly; when he fishes it out of his jacket, he takes one look at the screen and brightens. Shane realizes that the smile he’s been on the receiving end of so far might have been a bit dialled down, if that is a full one. ”Sorry, it’s him,” Aaron says, ”it was nice seeing you,” and then, into the phone, ”hey, babe.”

Shane leaves with the one lonely orange in his basket, and no other citrus.

If he’d kept going to all the dates that Jackie and Hayden kept finding for him, he supposes he would have, like Aaron, found himself a boyfriend, too, eventually. Some coffee shop owner, or an architect, or a wannabe-actor-slash-waiter that would call him ”babe”, too, when shopping for dinner ingredients. It hardly matters when the nondescript, hypothetical boyfriend is not an asshole with an accent curling around his vowels and a blurry photo of Shane giving him the middle finger set as his phone background, but Shane supposes — eventually, that’s what would have happened.

It also means that if he hadn’t agreed to this whole thing with Ilya, maybe Ilya would have found someone like that, too — one of the people he’d slept with, someone like Shane but more fun, maybe, someone who would go out to parties with him, and who’d smoke his awful cigarettes, and would be spontaneous and relaxed like Ilya is. Someone who’d see his name on their phone screen and smile a brighter smile. It’s not fair of Shane to keep that from him. Even without asking Ilya anything, he knows as much.

*

Because Shane was his mother’s son and believed everything was possible if you planned well enough for it, in an effort to present their relationship as believable, he made a dating schedule. Public dates, which consisted of Shane-and-Ilya plus at least one of their friends that were to happen in sensible intervals, group outings here and there, and date nights, which was code name for when he and Ilya met to hook up. ”They need to see us date,” he told Ilya over the phone, after he’d informed him about this idea over text and Ilya called him back within 10 minutes demanding to know if he hadn’t by any chance confused the concept of fake dating with a tournée, ”or Hayden will never leave me alone with his whole fucking matchmaking thing. Trust me.”

It was, in fact, the hardest with Hayden. ”I know you don’t like him very much,” Shane told him when he first called him about this, pressing the phone between his ear and his shoulder as he put the ingredients for his morning smoothie in the blender, ”but I really hope you can get along.”

”You know I love you, bud, but you’re asking too much of me,” Hayden said. There was some commotion on his end; one of the kids was screaming. ”Best I can do is not push him into oncoming traffic.”

”That would be great, actually.” Shane took out a glass from the cupboard above the coffee machine. ”It would be even better if you could not kill him and come hang out this Saturday.”

”He’s a fucking nightmare,” Hayden only said, like it was a logical answer. Shane found himself bristling at this, led by some impulse he was not familiar with. It was funny how it had been unacceptable when Shane hadn’t had a boyfriend, but also equally bad when he got one that Hayden did not like. Ilya wasn’t a bad person. The fact that they were only pretending to date was, in this context, inconsequential.

”Well, he’s my boyfriend now, so I suggest you get used to him being around more often,” Shane said. It sounded sharp. Referring to Ilya as his boyfriend still felt strange in his mouth, like biting into a fruit he’d never tasted before, but he figured he'd better get used to it himself, too. Then he breathed and tried to sand the edges of his voice down. ”Hayd.”

Hayden sighed, very deeply. ”Fine,” he finally said. ”Fine, I’ll be there. See you, man. I gotta run, Jade is trying to strangle her brother.”

”See you,” Shane said. ”Thanks.”

On Saturday, they all sat down in his living room and played video games, Shane wedged between Ilya and Hayden as a precaution. It didn’t help much. He held his own against them in NHL, but lost miserably at Tekken, which meant the title of the best player was between the two of them to decide. It went, ultimately, to Hayden, who was absolutely unbeatable at FIFA — which Shane had known and Ilya refused to accept. He kept grumbling about it around mouthfuls of the Thai curry Shane had ordered as a token of a truce. Shane could feel against his own body, where Ilya was pressed to his side, that he had to restrain himself from reacting physically when Hayden called him a loser.

They were still sniping at each other every chance they got, but it wasn’t like Shane had been expecting much else. If anything, their bickering worked for the narrative Ilya and him wanted to sell. ”You only won because I went easy on you. Because Shane asked me,” Ilya said after he lost his third game; Shane had done no such thing. ”And I am a good boyfriend.”

”Sure, Rozanov,” Hayden replied, gloating, ”keep telling yourself that.”

It did feel strange, then, to lift his hand and pet Ilya’s shoulder lightly in consolation, but only at the beginning. They had discussed this because Shane wouldn’t be himself if he hadn’t sat Ilya down and gone through their plan like he was running military drills. He felt stiff under the weight of Hayden’s attention whenever he leaned into Ilya on the couch, and it felt forced when he, at one point, took Ilya’s hand in his just to hold it while another gameplay was loading. But it didn’t feel as artificial when Ilya gathered him closer with an arm around his waist, and then even less so whenever he bumped their knees together. When Shane grabbed his hand, Ilya interlaced their fingers, then lifted Shane’s hand to his lips to press a quick kiss to it, as if absentmindedly. He was good at pretending, Shane thought; it looked like it came to him easily. Hayden’s eyes, darting from Shane’s hand at Ilya’s lips to Shane’s face — by now completely red, surely — felt like a physical weight.

”I can’t believe it,” Hayden told him later, when Ilya left them for a few minutes to go get himself another Coke from the fridge. Shane twitched, momentarily anxious, until Hayden continued in a low voice, ”I mean, you? With him?”

”Yes,” Shane only said, at a normal volume. ”Me with him.”

”I don’t get it.” Shane had figured that much. ”You had so many other options. Why fucking—him?”

”Because he is funny and smart and a good person,” Shane found himself spitting back. Hayden hadn’t seen Ilya helping a young boy up at the ice rink when he’d kept falling nearby, wobbly in his skates, or how he’d stop to pet a dog every time he saw one somewhere out on the street, or how, whenever he talked about Svetlana, something about his face softened. He never touched Shane without his consent. When Shane had told him about his anxiety, and trouble reading people, and complicated relationship with being half-Japanese, he hadn’t made fun of him at all. ”You would see it, too, if you only bothered to really look. But you clearly don’t want to do that.”

It wasn’t fair to say it; he knew that much. But he refused to let himself feel guilty about it, even though the spark of it was there somewhere like a pinprick between his ribs. Hayden grumbled some more; Shane pressed play on his controller and, because it was Hayden and Shane loved him even when he was annoying, let him kick his ass on the screen as a form of consolation. But when Ilya came back to the room with two Cokes in his hand, one of which he threw haphazardly at Hayden’s head, and a ginger ale that he placed on the table in front of Shane, Shane did not need to try that hard, after all, to lean over and press a quick kiss to Ilya’s cheek, muttering, ”Thanks.”

Rose, in comparison, took them to a very elegant wine bar, chose the most dimly-lit corner, smiled prettily at Shane, warm like the sun, and that was all it took for Shane to unwind a fraction and thank whatever fate had brought her into his life and kept her in it. She then proceeded to corner Ilya with so many questions Shane got dizzy within the first ten minutes. None of them were suspicious. All of them were good-naturedly excited, like the ones she asked him when he first told her about Ilya, only tenfold in volume.

”What is your zodiac sign,” she asked, making a face at Ilya’s answer that Shane wasn’t sure how to interpret, and then, ”What is your favourite childhood memory?” and ”What is your love language?” Ilya had no answer to the last one, to which Rose immediately made him pull up an online quiz and find out. She made Shane take it too; it was good, apparently, that they had similar results. Shane had blushed, stupidly, at the mention of physical touch; Ilya only winked at Rose, the asshole.

It was nice. Rose seemed genuinely happy to learn who Ilya was in a light different to just being her girlfriend’s best friend. Her ex-boyfriend’s current boyfriend seemed like a role that she accepted just fine. ”Shane and I used to date, you know,” she mentioned offhandedly, breaking off pieces of her breadstick and popping them into her mouth. She raised her eyebrows at Shane’s muttered, pleading, Rose. ”What? I don’t think we ever mentioned that, right? And Ilya should know.” She turned towards him. He was looking at her with a sudden intensity. ”It lasted all of two months. Not to brag, but I'm pretty sure I was the one who made Shane realize he’s gay.”

Ilya’s incredulous expression broke when he barked out a laugh. ”That bad?”

”Oh, he was sweet and very hot, but we are definitely better off as friends,” she shrugged, then asked, ”Is it true you asked him out first?” and looked delighted at Ilya’s confirmation. Then, she said, in a slightly different tone of voice, ”So when did you first think you might like him?”

”First time I saw his freckles.” Which was not true, obviously, but Shane guessed Ilya had to come up with something; it was good enough. Ilya mimicked getting struck in the chest, as if by what was presumably an invisible cupid’s arrow, and falling back in his chair; Shane only rolled his eyes and patted his knee under the table, and then remembered they were on a date and Rose was right here and he could — should — touch Ilya all he wanted, so he opted for taking his hand right there for everyone to see, brushing over his knuckles with his thumb, right where he knew Ilya had a small scar he once told him he got at eleven from a fight in a hockey game. Ilya sent him a surprised smile at that. It looked unexpectedly shy on him. ”Stunning.”

”Hm, he is.” When Shane looked at her, Rose was wearing, startlingly, her rare stern expression. He was not used to seeing it on her. ”Ilya, I will only say it once. If you hurt him, we will have a serious problem. Okay?”

”Yes,” Ilya answered easily. His fingers twitched under Shane’s touch. ”Got it.” The intensity of Rose’s sudden protectiveness didn’t seem to faze him. It was misplaced, anyway, since they were not in a real relationship, Shane guessed, though it still made him feel unsteady.

Whatever it is we are playing at, he wanted to tell Rose but obviously couldn’t, is not real enough to hurt either of us. Don’t worry.

He carried the same sentiment into their meet-up with Svetlana when she took them to what Ilya claimed was the only good Russian restaurant in the city. She did not test Shane’s knowledge about Ilya at all, despite what he had been dreading. Instead, she asked polite, thoughtful questions about Shane himself, did not seem to mind he had trouble looking her in the eye half the time and sided with him against Ilya when they started to talk about hockey and arguing if New York had a real chance of winning the Stanley Cup this season. All her observations were excellent; she seemed to enjoy riling Ilya up just for the sake of it; their easy back-and-forth made Shane think that this was what having a sibling must be like. They became, at one point, determined to teach Shane Russian curse words, dissecting them by individual syllables despite the looks it earned them from other nearby-sitting guests. Ilya, looking delighted, kept correcting Shane’s pronunciation until he got all of it right. It had been mildly uncomfortable, but Shane wanted to sell the lie well and wanted Svetlana to like him. Ilya seemed pleased with the blush Shane could feel on his face. His arm was looped around Shane’s waist all night; when Shane finally got all of what they told him that meant go fuck yourself, loser out in one wobbly go, Ilya whooped excitedly and pressed a proud kiss to Shane’s brow, still furrowed in concentration; Svetlana did not bat an eye.

”I told you you’d have fun,” Ilya told him as they were leaving, once Shane could pronounce blyat perfectly and call anyone who would care to listen a miserable, talentless moron in nearly accentless Russian.

Shane found that, somehow, he had.

The truth was, maybe, that by the end of it, he’d forgotten about his calculations and carefully placed hands and lingering touches, and just kind of let things happen. That’s what tended to happen around Ilya anyway — things just went their own way. And if Shane found himself clinging less to his carefully planned out dating schedule and more to the easy, pretty way Ilya smiled at him and curled a relaxed arm around Shane’s shoulders and kissed his temple and his mouth for everyone to see, and then spread him open when they were alone, got him writhing and pleading under his wonderful, clever hands — well. Who could blame him?

*

Ilya keeps texting him throughout the week like he is a man on a mission, but then again, they always text these days. Shane is usually a slow responder, but Ilya doesn’t seem to mind. He sends him pictures from the night out with a former client-turned-friend, whom he claims to have destroyed at darts; complains about a dentist’s appointment; sends him some stupid memes about the last movie they saw together that they both agreed was completely shit.

As is tradition, on Wednesday Shane gets out at noon to grab lunch with his mom. She’s still tanned from the vacation in Mexico, though the stress of the everyday has already started to creep back into the lines of her face, sharpening up the relaxation his parents came back with two weeks prior when Shane first saw them. The weather is nice, so they get sandwiches and go take a walk in the nearby park. Halfway through his mom’s updates about dad’s unsettlingly rising cholesterol levels, Shane’s phone wakes up to life in his pocket with a rapid succession of text notifications.

”I forgot to silence it,” he mutters apologetically, fishing it out. It’s Ilya. He’s sent four different pictures of dogs in various states of excitement, which means he must be at the dog shelter again, taking them for a walk like he volunteers every other week. Shane is not nearly as much of a dog person as Ilya is but he cannot help but smile down at his phone at the sight. Ilya claims he won’t, but Shane’s been waiting for the day he finally goes and adopts one.

The last picture is of Ilya smushing half of his face into the fur of a very happy-looking Maltese.

”Everything okay?” his mom asks.

He hasn’t told his parents about Ilya, obviously; he isn’t sure what’s there to tell. The idea of it has felt unfathomable when he asked Hayden, in a very urgent tone of voice, a few months back, not to mention his new boyfriend to his parents if there ever was a potential opening to do so. What would he say, anyway?

Except for a strange, drawn-out moment, led by some impulse he isn’t sure he’s experienced before, he kind of wants to tell his mom something. Look, here’s this absurd guy. I think you’d like him. I do.

”Yeah,” he says instead. He locks his phone without replying and pockets it. ”Sure.”

Later, after he hugs his mom goodbye and promises to come by for dinner next Sunday, he taps back into the conversation with Ilya and, still led by the same impulse, texts, The last one is cute.

I knew you will like this one, Ilya responds almost right away. I am irresistible.

I meant the dog, obviously.

I have a boyfriend, Hollander, fyi, Ilya texts back. The typing bubble hovers for a while. He doesn’t really share.

He doesn’t have to, Shane almost types. You’re not really his.

But that would be stupid. Ilya knows this, and Ilya is joking, because he usually is.

He sounds kind of dull, he sends back after a moment and doesn’t really fight the smile that breaks out on his face, the strange breath that escapes him, at Ilya’s response of, Is what I like about him most.

*

Around six months ago, Shane woke up one Friday morning to find that he had slept through his alarm, which never happened to him, and that was how a streak of absolutely miserable fucking events started that day. His right blinker stopped working when he was halfway to the clinic; his first patient of the day turned out to be the celiac amateur baseball player that Harris at the reception desk kept insisting had been trying to flirt with him; he spilled coffee all over the front of his shirt when he accidentally bumped into a fucking trashcan in the hallway, then hit his head on one of the kitchen cupboards as he was trying to salvage the situation at the kitchen sink. By the time the afternoon rolled around, he had an ongoing mental list of additional accidents he was actively and grimly anticipating. When he got a text from Ilya at the end of the day asking if he was free and available to come over, he half-expected his phone to burst into flames as he carefully typed up a response. You’ll feel better once you come)) Ilya replied to his reluctant text about his bad fucking luck and feeling like a threat to anyone within a two-kilometre radius.

Whoever convinced you you were funny was a liar, Shane texted back.

And you cannot sext for shit, was Ilya’s response, and then, Just come over. I am very talented at making you feel good, no?

He was. It did help a little in the end, after Shane had successfully managed to get to Ilya’s despite his useless right fucking blinker, to take his ruined, coffee-stained shirt off and let Ilya have his way with him. They made out like teenagers until Shane’s lips were buzzing and his head felt light on his shoulders, and he felt a bit less like he was about to vibrate out of his skin from stress. Then, after Ilya pushed him face-first into the mattress — careful not to jostle what at this point must have been a sizeable bump on the right side of his head, courtesy of the clinic kitchen cupboard’s sharp edge — and made him moan incoherently into the pillows and come in record time, he made them sandwiches and, tossing a can of ginger ale at Shane that he managed to catch and not get decked in the forehead with, thank fuck, said, ”Wanna watch something?”

”Um,” Shane replied, suddenly unsure, instead of saying what he really wanted, which was, Didn’t you say once you didn’t like ginger ale? Why is it in your fridge? or even, I should probably get back home. ”Sure, I guess.”

Ilya put on a movie full of explosions and car races that he seemed to enjoy immensely. Shane, who normally wouldn’t mind that at all, tried to focus at the beginning, but then the weight and stress of the day must have caught up to him, along with the more pleasant, bone-deep fatigue from his orgasm, because he suddenly felt so tired that he fell asleep halfway through.

When he woke up to sunlight and the scent of Ilya’s fabric softener and realized that he had accidentally stayed over until morning and hadn’t even brushed his teeth the night before, he proceeded to silently freak out, unsure which of these was worse but terrified by both. Ilya took one look at his face and then, bleary-eyed and messy-haired, nuzzled into his neck right where Shane’s pulse had been hammering, pinned his hips to the bed with a heavy hand and used the other to gently stroke the tip of Shane’s cock until he had him leaking into his fist and groaning into his hair, too desperate to come to worry about anything else.

After that, the minute he had his breath back, he kicked Ilya out of his own bed and made him rummage through his bathroom drawers for a spare toothbrush. All Ilya found was a travel-sized hygiene kit stolen from a Holiday Inn. ”I provide for the people I take to bed,” Ilya said, handing him the little cardboard square of it, the green little H stark in the centre, ”because I am a gentleman.”

”More like a hotel thief,” Shane replied, shaking the tiny toothbrush out of the box. His head hurt, but barely. Maybe he could ask Ilya to lend him a shirt for the day, or just take one out of his closet. They brushed their teeth with their shoulders bumping; then, the second Shane was done, Ilya crowded him against the sink and kissed him silly.

The next time Shane came over, after Ilya’d cupped his jaw and licked at the seam of his lips and led him to the couch, where Shane had gone down to his knees with little fanfare and had proceeded to suck Ilya off until he had him panting at his nice high ceiling, Ilya grabbed his wrist and dragged him to the bathroom. ”A gift,” he said, pushing Shane gently in front of him. Shane went, a little cottony-headed like he always felt when he got to put his mouth on Ilya.

”I feel like I should be scared of whatever gift you’d keep in the bathroom,” he mused. The bathroom light flickered on; Ilya stopped, leaning against the doorframe. He tried to leer at Shane, except it was ruined by the flush still high in his cheeks, his eyes still glazed over with remnants of pleasure. He gestured broadly at nothing in particular, but then Shane saw that in the little plastic cup he had made Ilya buy after he’d first noticed that Ilya had been leaving his own toothbrush lying straight on the sink like a heathen, there was an extra toothbrush now. It was blue.

”So you can relax now, when you stay over,” Ilya informed him, ”and so I don’t have to look at your crisis face right when I wake up.”

”I don’t have a crisis face,” Shane said.

”You do,” Ilya insisted. ”Is when you get stressed but don’t want anyone to notice. It’s funny, but maybe not first thing in the morning. Look,” he pointed to the sink, ”I got your favourite colour. Blue, yes?”

It didn’t feel as monumental as it should have, in that moment — the warmth of Ilya’s body at his back, the prospect of staying the night again, the toothbrush. Shane was distracted by fighting the sudden urge to ask how Ilya knew his favourite colour; until Ilya said it, he hadn’t even been sure he had one. The bristles of the toothbrushes were facing each other in the cup. Ilya’s fingers were a warm weight at the small of Shane’s back.

”Thank you,” Shane said, looking into Ilya’s blue, blue eyes. ”Yes.”

*

Shane does not rearrange his pantry, but he does reorganize the spice rack. He goes to the gym, bench presses until he’s cursing and monopolizes the rowing machine until his muscles are screaming at him. He comes back home, starts up the laundry, opens his closet and sorts all the shirts by colour. Then, he makes a list.

Or, tries to make a list, anyway. The YES and NO he scribbles on a legal pad he keeps lying around in the kitchen to make grocery lists on stare at him from the top of the page like a dubious beginning of a high school essay, or like a weird iteration of loves me, loves me not. Shane sits down at his kitchen table, grips the pen very hard and looks at the words, unblinking, for a very long time.

It’s so fucking dumb.

There are options. No — Ilya does not want him. Ilya is pretending to date him for a bet that he’d made with a friend, a long time ago, that he wants to win. He’s only doing what he’s supposed to be doing to make that happen; what Shane himself had told him to do, at the very beginning however many months ago, when he presented the godforsaken dating schedule, gripping the phone in his hand, saying, we need to show off if we want to do it right, stop fucking laughing, it’s a good idea. Ilya does not— like him, or anything more, because why would he when he’d told Shane himself that he could have anyone, that this is easy only because they both have a point to prove to someone, because they’re already fucking. What’s a few kisses in public on top of that? What does it cost him to lace their fingers together and pull Shane closer by the waist when touch comes so easily to him anyway?

Shane’s spine feels like an iron rod. His hand hovers over the page.

Worse — Ilya does want him, but only as someone he hooks up with for fun, someone he goes to for a physical sensation, even if it is tangled up in an overcomplicated arrangement. Worse still, for how much more possible it is — Ilya does want him, but only as a friend, because he is attentive and caring and generous, and so he gives Shane what they had agreed on, meaning incredible sex and a tentative friendship. He looks at Shane and doesn’t feel much. He looks at Shane and only feels what he’s supposed to feel, instead of how Shane is feeling, tender and breakable under Ilya’s attention, freshly bruised with belatedly realized want.

This makes sense. Ilya is just— good at pretending, and generous with his affection because that’s simply who he is, and if the two blend together, it is Shane’s fault, at the end of the day, that he has lost track of what’s what. That’s on him.

He touches the tip of the pen to the page on the NO part. Doesn’t write anything.

But then — all the texts their friends do not see, and the pictures. The phone calls. The stolen t-shirts, the toothbrushes they have for each other in their apartments, the minature jars of his skincare products that live on Ilya’s top shelf above the bathroom sink, the decaf coffee Shane knows Ilya doesn’t drink but keeps at his place just for Shane, the overhead lights in his living room he never turns on anymore because he knows Shane thinks they’re too bright. All the afternoons-turned-nights they’ve spent lazily kissing on the couch until Shane’s head was swimming and his lips felt raw, before it went any further. The few times when the only thing that could coax a smile out of Ilya, sadder and quieter than Shane had been used to, was Shane pulling up some beginner guides to reading Cyrillic on his phone and sounding out the unfamiliar syllables, sticking them together into words with Ilya’s patient, muted, ah, that was horrible, following every third attempt. All the things Shane knows about him now — that he hates Brussels sprouts like a fucking child, and cries at musicals. That when he gets nervous, his hand always seeks out the crucifix at his neck, as if to make sure it is still there. That his father suffered from Alzheimer’s, and so he always keeps a sudoku puzzle book in the living room now, says it is good for the brain, reaches for it every time a commercial break on TV runs too long.

There was this one time Shane had found an almost-pristine-looking copy of Russian crossword puzzles at a second-hand bookshop across town; the way Ilya looked at him when he handed it over later made him flush with embarrassment. Still, he said, ”I just thought maybe you’d like it, as a change of pace.” Ilya let out a strange breath at that. There had been more Shane wanted to tell him — that Ilya didn’t have to take it if he didn’t want to, that maybe it was silly, that Shane just saw it and thought of him and was that a weird thing to do, that he bought it? — but the words never made it past his lips because then Ilya was crowding him against the kitchen island and cupping his jaw and licking into his mouth. ”Thank you,” he muttered between one kiss and the next, and then the same in Russian. ”Spasibo. Ty takoy milyy.”

He snapped a picture of it, later, and sent it to Svetlana. Shane had wondered, thoroughly kissed and buzzy with it, if Ilya did it because he just wanted to share or if he’d simply had the foresight to use it as a prop to uphold the false front of their relationship. It stung for a second. He never asked Ilya about it.

He doesn’t know what to do with all these things. He only knows what he wants them to mean, and not what they really are. He moves his useless fucking pen over to the YES section of the page and doesn’t write anything there, either.

Ilya, for all intents and purposes, has won the bet — the six months Svetlana had settled with him for are long over. Maybe he just forgot about it, in the chaos of his everyday, let the time slip past him. Shane should— remind him, maybe. Ask about this precarious thing between them, and say, in his defense, he’s missed it, too, between arguing with Ilya about the New Jersey Devils’ awful fucking finishing and save percentage, kicking his ass at card games, looking at him across tables and crowded rooms, panting out yes, yes right into his mouth, counting the moles on his back, staying the night, everything else. All of it. I didn’t know, he should say. I didn’t know it would be like this.

He tears the YES and NO page out, empty.

Months ago, there had been this one, nearly three-week-long stretch of time when Ilya had been away, back in Boston for a friend’s wedding and then sorting out some administrative stuff leftover from back when he lived there. Fuck taxes and residence permits, he’d told Shane enigmatically before he left. They had been texting throughout; Shane had spent the first few days feeling like he’d been missing a lung until he finally gave in and called. ”I didn’t want to bother you,” he’d let it slip out at one point, expecting to hear something like, you usually do, Hollander, in response, but Ilya had only said, warmly, ”You aren’t.” Shane curled up in bed with the phone pressed to his ear, then, listened to Ilya’s complaints about closed banks and confusing paperwork, and missed him so stupidly in that moment that it felt like it was happening to someone else. When he closed his eyes, Ilya’s voice sounded almost like he was in the room with him.

He should have known then, probably.

*

Around four months ago, Shane just finished putting away laundry when he got a message from Jackie. Do you and Ilya want to come over on Sunday and hang out? she sent. Without waiting for an answer, she followed with, Please say yes, and then, 12PM? She tacked on the praying hands emoji at the end.

Shane smoothed the stack of t-shirts down where they sat on the middle shelf, slid the closet shut and typed back, I’m afraid your husband will murder Ilya with a pair of kitchen scissors the moment he steps foot in your house.

Jackie, having been absolutely adamant to find out in person who ”Shane’s new, long-awaited boyfriend” was, right when they first started up this whole flaming fucking circus — and also refusing to let Hayden be the only parent out of the two of them who got to have a somewhat successful social life — had actually met Ilya before. Shane had been mortified at the prospect of it the first time around, though, as it had turned out, completely unnecessarily. Jackie had charmed Ilya the second she’d challenged him to a pool match, which she had also subsequently won. Ilya had, as the defeated party, bought everyone drinks. ”Jackie,” he had said very seriously, ”if Pike is keeping you hostage in his house, blink twice. I do not believe you live with him willingly.”

She had laughed loudly at it, then louder when Shane pinched Ilya’s arm for the comment.

”Ilya,” he’d said warningly, hiding the curve of his mouth behind the rim of his ginger ale can at Ilya’s muttered, ”Fucking ouch, Hollander.”

”If someone’s keeping anyone hostage there, it’s Ruby and her nerf gun,” Jackie’d said, shaking her head. ”Hayd and I are in this together,” and then laughed again, eyes crinkling, at Ilya’s answering, ”Ruby. I have to meet her. Anyone who terrorises Hayden Pike is a friend of— ow, okay, fucking stop—”

We have a big backyard, should be easy to bury the body, Jackie texted back.

Don’t tempt me with a good time, Shane replied, smiling, and then, I’ll ask Ilya.

He sent Ilya the screenshot of the conversation and a shovel emoji, and a question mark. Ilya called him within the next five minutes, already laughing.

On Sunday, they showed up at exactly 12PM. Hayden let them in, disgruntled. ”Watch it, Rozanov,” he said a propos nothing and then pretended not to see the look Shane slanted at him.

”You’re always so rude to your guests, Pike?” Ilya said, stepping inside. ”No wonder nobody likes you.”

”Fuck off,” Hayden retorted, and then a small choir of high-pitched voices from further into the house squealed, Uh-oh, daddy!

It felt strange to watch Ilya with the Pikes — stranger still, given how effortlessly charming he was with them. Ruby and Jade took one look at him, demanded to know his name and then immediately granted him their respect when Ilya asked to see the infamous nerf gun. Arthur shyly showed him his favourite book. Ilya pretended to arm-wrestle Ruby, her small hand disappearing in his, and let her win, then agreed to have his nails painted. ”Purple,” he said when Jade asked what colour nail polish he wanted, ”but let’s be quiet so we don’t wake your little sister, yes?” Jackie sent him a grateful look.

Shane watched the scene play out with quiet amusement as he and Arthur sorted Lego blocks into small, neat piles of yellow, black and blue on the floor. The feeling then carried when he went to check on Jackie in the kitchen. She was in the middle of finishing up the pasta sauce.

”Here,” she said, ushering him in front of the cutting board, ”you can help with dessert,” so that’s what Shane did, and it was nice, to chatter with Jackie about the twin’s preschool and Arthur’s drawings stuck onto the fridge and Amber’s still-irregular bedtime, until she sighed happily and said, in a quieter, almost wistful tone, ”I’m so happy for you, Shane.”

He sent her a quizzical look up from where he had been cutting up strawberries. ”Uh, thanks?”

”You and Ilya,” she said, gesturing lazily to the living room with a spatula, where Shane could faintly hear Ilya agreeing to the twins putting extra pink glitter on his nails, too. ”He’s such a sweet guy.”

”Don’t say this where Hayden can hear you,” Shane told her. He tried to focus, very intensely, on the remaining fruit under his knife.

Jackie huffed. The spatula swung in her hand in a mindless arch. ”He’s really good for you, I think.” Shane could hear the smile in her voice. ”You’re good for each other. Hayden sees it, too, even though he likes to pretend it pains him.”

Shane’s grip on the knife faltered; he narrowly missed cutting his pinky. He curled his hand up and corrected his hold on the handle and did his best to ignore the strange pressure in his throat. He wanted to ask Jackie why she thought so; what it was about him — or about Ilya, or about Ilya and him together, laughing and touching and squabbling — that convinced her. He wanted to turn to the living room and go tell Ilya, hey, we’ve done a good job. Don’t you think we’re good for each other? I do.

”That’s nice,” he said to Jackie instead. Then, ”Do you have a bowl for this?”

After dinner, with the kids gently bullied into a precarious, probably short-lived nap, they sat down to play Monopoly. It became very apparent very quickly that Ilya was a money-hungry cheater at heart. Shane glared at his freshly painted, pink-purple nails as he put up his hotels around the board. He had little golden stars stuck to both of his thumbnails.

”I let you win at other things,” Ilya told him after he’d decimated Shane twice in a row within just over an hour. Hayden had left halfway through their second game to go check on Amber upstairs. Jackie had been happily tapping away at her phone and sipping her wine for the past twenty minutes. ”I am a good boyfriend. Relax.”

”You didn’t let me win anything,” Shane only said.

”Pay up,” Ilya said in response. He stretched out a hand, bits of pink glitter still stuck to the side of his palm. ”Those are game rules. I thought you like rules, solnyshko.”

”Not when somebody’s using them to cheat, I don’t,” Shane said to that, but he paid. Then he demanded, ”Another round.”

”Hollander,” Ilya sighed and shook his head, feigning disappointment, ”you are such sore loser, I had no idea—”

”Well, you are an asshole, but I knew that already.”

”Last round,” Jackie cut in from the opposite side of the table. Her eyes sparkled as she clicked her phone shut and got up. ”And then come and help me clean up, please, or you’re getting banned from Monopoly in this house.”

She left. Shane proceeded to lose the next round too, much to Ilya’s delight.

”You are very bad at this game,” Ilya said, grinning and counting his stupid fake money that he cheated Shane out of with all his dumb fucking hotels. ”Didn’t know it was possible.”

Shane narrowed his eyes at him. ”Capitalist sellout.”

It only thawed his ridiculous anger a little, then, when Ilya started laughing. ”How dare you,” he said, face bright and open. He gripped the edge of the seat of Shane’s chair and pulled it closer to his own, then wound an arm around Shane’s shoulders to tug him closer still. ”I am a child of the Soviet Union.”

He started pressing short, sweet kisses to Shane’s temple, his furrowed eyebrows, then the pout of his mouth until Shane gave in and melted and let himself be kissed — until Jackie called out from the kitchen, until he thought, somewhere in the back of his head, his fingers skimming the line of Ilya’s jaw, that maybe it was okay to lose, just this once, if it meant he got to see Ilya’s smile in return.

He did not realize until much later that there had been no audience in the room to kiss in front of at all.

*

Rose is the birthday girl, so she chooses the restaurant. That’s how they end up at a hole-in-the-wall, greasy pizza joint for their long-awaited double date. ”I will not be shamed for my guilty pleasures” is all Rose says when she sees Shane’s expression, ”and especially not on my birthday.”

”I didn’t say anything,” he says.

”You didn’t have to,” Rose says easily. ”We all know you love to judge sometimes. It’s a part of your charm.”

Ilya cackles at that; Shane chooses to ignore this bout of slander about him because he is a good friend and loves Rose. Instead, he slides into the seat next to Ilya, tries not to think about the sticky plastic countertop under his hands and leans over the menu like there is much to choose from at all. There is a blue, blinking neon sign on the opposite wall, reflecting in the surface of the window they sit by. It casts a cool glow over Ilya’s face, makes the lines of his profile look more pronounced. He looks good.

His knee is pressed to Shane’s under the table, the kind of absentminded touch they, by now, reach for automatically. That Shane reaches for but maybe shouldn’t; that Shane, despite that, reaches for automatically and hopes Ilya does, too. He doesn’t know if he has any right to hope for such things.

They order. Ilya makes a face at the copious amount of olives on his pizza once it arrives, so Shane graciously lets him pile about half of them on his own plate; in return, he gives Ilya some of his cherry tomatoes. As they swap, he catches Svetlana watching them with a measuring sort of look on her face that he doesn’t quite know how to interpret, but it’s gone as quickly as it appears. She switches her attention to showing them pictures of the car she plans to buy, which turns into Rose telling them, after she hadn’t gotten the part in the latest horrible car chase movie, about a new medical show she’s auditioning for, which then transitions into Shane begrudgingly recounting every instance of an injury that has ever landed him in a hospital, doubling down when Ilya makes a competition out of it and starts listing his own. Shane wins it. His three concussions hold up proudly against Ilya’s pitiful one.

The look in Svetlana’s eye only comes back later, once they are left alone.

Admittedly, this still doesn’t happen often. There is usually a third party somewhere to diffuse the weird tension that only Shane seems to be feeling. He knows, by now, how to operate around Svetlana when paired up with other people; when they’re left one on one, he walks on uneven terrain, unsure where to place the next step. He’s seen her relaxed and tipsy on a club dance floor, poised and unimpressed and rolling her eyes at mediocre films in the low cinema light, sleep-rumpled and bleary-eyed, one notable early morning when he swung by Rose’s place before work and forgot to warn her beforehand. Still, around Svetlana, Shane feels stiff. But Ilya suggested getting Rose candles for the meal because why should she only get to have them on a cake when she can have them on everything else, too, as is birthday privilege, and she gasped at the idea, excited. They’ve gone off to the nearby corner shop before Shane could do anything more than fondly roll his eyes. He takes another bite of his pizza and consciously loosens the line of his shoulders.

Svetlana wipes her fingers on a napkin before she rests her chin in her hand. ”This is a little like the place Rose took me to for our first date,” she says conversationally.

Shane chews carefully, swallows. ”Bold choice,” he says.

”Very much so.” She folds the flimsy paper napkin in half. ”The margaritas they served were horrendous. They were playing the same three songs on repeat the whole night. ”

This, in turn, makes Shane smile. ”Not the best circumstances to fall in love under.”

”No,” Svetlana agrees. ”But Rose made it easy for me anyway.” She lets the napkin fall onto her plate. ”What about you and Ilyusha?”

It’s that look in her eyes. Shane thinks she’s asking about something else, at first. Yes, he wants to say like a pining idiot, yes, he made it easy for me, too. Even when Shane didn’t know it was happening, it came to him readily. But then he remembers that this is Svetlana, and that she knows this about Ilya, surely — probably knows more than Shane has the right to, the realization settling unpleasantly in his gut even though he tries to smother it — and he bites the words back.

”We went to a sports bar,” Shane tells her, and she accepts it comfortably. ”The Blues really whaled it on the Canucks that night.”

”It’s criminal what their defense is doing this season,” she says, like the thought of it alone pains her.

Shane latches onto it. ”They shouldn’t have traded Davids for Nicholson.” Svetlana nods gravely. ”They lost a lot of depth with him gone.”

They go back and forth for a bit. The change of topic makes Shane uncoil a fraction further, which might have been Svetlana’s point anyway; she’s skilled like that. But as they talk about Tampa Bay’s goalie’s early retirement rumours, something about how she looks at him keeps snagging at his attention like a sharp edge on a fabric. She used to skate, too, she tells Shane at one point, sipping her drink. Did figure skating back in Russia as a kid before she moved to the States for high school. She was average at it, which she admits to with offhand indifference. She used to goad Ilya into trying out some of the jumps as she was learning them; it had been very fun.

”He always tried very hard,” she says. The blue light of the blinking neon reaches her, too; she and Ilya are similarly beautiful, in a striking, almost startling way. ”It always made me laugh a lot, all these painstaking jumps that he landed even with his hockey skates on. He stopped with hockey soon after, so it didn’t last long, but still.” Her face softens like it rarely does; the blue neon glow brings it out. ”At least the making me laugh part stayed.”

”And it’s not easy to make you laugh,” Shane hears himself say. Then, he fumbles. What the fuck. ”Sorry, that was rude, I just meant—”

But Svetlana nods before he can backtrack further, like he’s given the correct answer to a question she hasn’t asked. ”It’s not.” She leans back in her seat. ”You neither.”

Not usually, maybe. But it’s very simple when he’s around Ilya. Shane laughs with him as much as he laughs at him, but it’s only fair when it is Shane getting made fun of half the time anyway. He doesn’t mind — Ilya teases when Shane’s wrong placing bets about hockey or loses to him at this stupid mobile quiz game Ilya makes them play against each other to keep up their streak, and Shane picks on him when Ilya fucks up breakfast, or when his hair gets frizzy, or whenever gets freaked out by a spider he finds in the house. The hardest he’d ever laughed was when he’d finally convinced him to try yoga and then watched Ilya struggle through a simple vinyasa. ”Fuck off,” Ilya had rasped at him, which only made Shane muffle another snort in his shoulder. ”I'm doing great.”

As a reward for completing the whole flow, Shane had ridden him right there on the living room floor, circling his hips and making small punched out noises every time he got the angle just right, until he had Ilya groaning out curses and clutching at him. This had been fun, too. ”I love yoga,” Ilya had muttered, after, with his shirt pushed up high on his chest and come drying on his stomach. ”Is my new favourite thing.” It made Shane huff out another laugh, still a little breathless, and swat weakly at Ilya’s chest. On the few occasions yoga was mentioned within his earshot after that, Ilya would find Shane’s eyes across whatever room they were in and wink.

”I guess,” he tells Svetlana. ”But he makes me laugh, too.”

”He does,” she agrees comfortably. ”That’s how I know he really likes you.” Shane deciphers the look on her face at last. This is how satisfaction looks on Svetlana, spilling warm and pleasant over her features. ”Whenever he makes a joke, he always looks at you first, just to see if you are laughing, too.”

*

About a month before, as Shane was still trying to catch his breath against the rumpled bedsheets and looking at where the last rays of sunshine were painting the wall of his bedroom a faint orange, he said, ”Sometimes I don’t understand what you get out of it.”

It wasn’t the truth, not entirely. In many ways, he did get it — the thrill of watching another person’s pleasure course through them, the pride of being the one able to make them feel this way. He fucking loved watching Ilya come apart under his hands, too. It was Ilya — of course it was spectacular.

But Ilya had just wrung three orgasms out of him, made him come easily into his hand, and then into his mouth, and then worked two, three, fuck, four fingers into him and sucked on his tongue until Shane had come from that, too, so sensitive he had cried, whimpering weakly right into his mouth. Ilya hadn’t come once. He’d batted Shane’s hands away when he tried to reach for him earlier. ”No,” he’d said, and the word shot straight through Shane, sweet and burning. ”Later."

”What I get out of it?” Ilya parroted now. Shane could see where he was hard, still in his briefs. Ilya seemed content to ignore it for now, for some fucking reason. Shane felt the urge to get his mouth around Ilya throb low in his gut, except he was too worn out to actually do anything about it for the time being.

”Mmm, yes,” he only said. He let his eyes travel up Ilya’s body where was moving to hover over Shane, all of the lithe, dangerous strength of him. When his face moved into Shane’s field of vision, he looked smug. Dazed, too, just a little.

”Very easy,” he said, planting a hand next to Shane’s head, caging him in. He brushed a thumb over Shane’s lower lip. ”I get you.” This didn’t really make sense to Shane, either. But then Ilya leaned down to press a kiss to where his thumb had just been, brief and biting, and said, ”I think you could give me one more,” and Shane had no choice but to breathe out, ”Fuck,” and, of course, ”okay,” and then table any further questioning because Ilya’s mouth was back on him, and Ilya was so good with his hands, with his whole body, that all Shane could do was stretch out underneath him and part his legs and let him get back to work.

*

Svetlana’s words sink claws into Shane and don’t let go for hours.

Rose blows out all her candles and charms the waiter into getting a free dessert. Shane does not leave early like Ilya said they could, but he does sit stiffer and more uptight in his seat, his glass of water sweating in his grip. Ilya notices, pulling his chair closer and curling an arm around the back of it. He rests his hand around the ball of Shane’s shoulder; his thumb brushes back and forth over it like it’s a habit; every time he catches Shane’s eye, it’s Shane who has to turn away first. He wants to tell him to stop looking.

He doesn’t. When they split for the night, he presses a kiss to Rose’s cheek, says goodbye to Svetlana and follows Ilya back to his own car because Ilya is coming over, because Shane asked him to over text last night. Ilya reacted to the message with a heart. Shane doesn’t know what the fuck he is doing.

”Put your seatbelt on, please,” he says when they get in, grasping for control.

Ilya hums. ”Bossy.”

”And shut up,” Shane adds. Ilya huffs out a laugh.

He drives them home. The whole way there, Ilya rests his hand on Shane’s thigh. He talks about something, but Shane barely listens because he knows, suddenly, that he had somehow missed the moment Ilya had started reaching for him without purpose, just to touch, and every time it happens now, it feels like getting repeatedly checked into the boards of an ice rink — keeps hurting, in different places. He wants it so bad he feels sick with it. He has to physically force himself to keep his eyes on the asphalt and not on the cut of Ilya’s profile against the pane of the passenger window, lest he swerve off the fucking road.

It’s too much. It’s not enough. Shane feels very young and stupid and on the brink of something, staring down.

So. They barely make it through the front door, and it’s like a switch getting flipped in his head the moment he’s in his own space again, before he’s speaking. ”Ilya,” he says. His voice sounds like a stranger’s. ”Do you want to break up?”

Ilya, half-turned away from him where he’s just pushed the front door shut, stops mid-movement. The lock clicks.

”What?” he says with a second-long glitch, like the visual and the sound of him have fallen out of synch. He turns to Shane fully. ”What do you mean?”

”Your six months are up,” Shane tells him. ”For the bet.”

Ilya blinks twice. His eyes don’t leave Shane’s face. His hands hover awkwardly, in a very unlike-him way, halfway in the air like he’s not sure what to do with them; then, when he lowers them, it looks like a conscious effort. He says, quietly, ”Ah. Right.”

”You technically won,” Shane reminds him.

”Technically. Yes.” There’s a flash of something across his still face. ”Did Sveta say something to you? Earlier?”

”No, I just thought about it.”

With a considerable delay, which they are both conscious of now, and a detour of a panicked realization. Ilya leans back against the front door as if in slow motion, presses his back to it like he needs to widen the distance between them.

For a moment, they just look at each other.

”What about you?” Ilya says at length. ”And Pike being annoying?” Shane expects the usual spark back in his voice at the mention of Hayden, but it’s absent.

”He’ll leave me alone, now, I think,” Shane says. It hardly matters. He hasn’t really thought about this side of things, too caught up in Ilya around him for no reason, or in Ilya around him for a reason he had agreed to and now, idiotically, can’t bear. He’d deal with it anyway. But he needs to know first. ”So do you? Want to break up?”

”Do you?” Ilya counters.

”I asked first.”

Ilya lets out a short breath at that. His eyes finally leave Shane’s face; once they do, he doesn’t look back. He keeps staring somewhere past Shane’s shoulder instead, something about his expression shuttering closed. He’s silent. They haven’t even taken off their shoes.

Fuck. They’re still in the fucking hallway. Ilya is— Ilya looks cornered because he is, because Shane caught him against the door and now the whole tense set of his body is saying that he doesn’t know if he is welcome to come in further anymore.

He is always welcome. Shane doesn’t know if he wants to be, but he is. When he thinks about Ilya pushing off, instead, and pulling the door open and leaving, the possibility of it catches in his throat.

He needs all of it, for real. The hunger for it pierces him through — for cooking side by side and arguing over hockey games and doing crossword puzzles on the couch during ad breaks with their ankles hooked together. For the silly date nights that used to mean hooking up and then morphed into that and watching bad movies together, that and beating each other at video games, scrolling on their phones in comfortable silence, shoulder to shoulder, everything in between. For Ilya’s appalling sugary breakfasts and the sight of him in the mornings, the raspy sound of his voice right after he wakes up, his off-tune humming as he brushes his teeth. The smell of his shampoo and his too-strong cologne. His arms around him, and the heat of his mouth, and the warmth of his smile, the cut of it pressed to Shane’s skin.

If Ilya wanted to end it, wouldn’t he say so? Wouldn’t he just go ahead with it, now that Shane brought it up? It should be easy for him, but he doesn’t look like it is. It’s as if Shane had knocked into him and realized, too late, that he’s jostled a bruise, an injury. It’s still an ache, even if mistakenly caused. Ilya had injured his wrist at the gym a few months back, an ache he had found annoying more than he did painful, but it lingered. Once, when they were crossing the street, Shane grabbed him too hard, too caught up with traffic and a biker speeding past them to remember to be careful about it. Ilya only made a small sound then, cut off before it even began. It was unlike him, with the way he’s always been loud about everything else, like pain was the exception to the rule of him, or like he had been coached to mask it specifically. His face went blank, like he tried to cover up his reaction by not having any. He looks similar now.

Shane breathes around his fear and manages to wrangle it into something controllable.

”I can’t keep pretending anymore,” he tells Ilya’s tense frame. ”Not when all I think about is that I want us to be real.” His head jerks. Shane blinks at his startled eyes. ”That’s what I want. You, all the time.”

Ilya swallows. The disbelieving slack of his mouth is enough to make Shane finally fucking move. He crosses the space between them until he can cup Ilya’s face with unsure hands. ”You need to tell me if I’m reading this correctly, okay?” he says carefully. Ilya has never been shy about what he wants, except he seems that way now, when he turns into Shane’s touch like he’s afraid it will sting. His grip on Shane’s waist is a hesitant weight. His fingers are trembling. ”Please tell me. Because I don’t know.”

”Yes,” Ilya is saying then, quietly. ”Yes, is what I want, too.”

The relief surges through his entire body like a shiver. He feels lightheaded with it. ”Yeah?” Ilya nods in response, then again, like he’s grasping for words.

”Yes. Of course, yes, fuck. Shane.” He turns his head, presses a kiss to Shane’s palm. The warmth of it makes Shane’s skin tingle. His eyes are burning. He very deliberately doesn’t blink, because he doesn’t want to fucking cry, except it feels like he might anyway. ”Fuck the stupid bet and everything else, I don’t care. I only care about you.”

Shane has no choice but to kiss him then, right against the front door, with Ilya suddenly gripping his waist so hard it will surely bruise. Shane wants that, too.

”Good,” he says between one breath and the next, ”Good, thank god.”

”I know it’s not always easy,” Ilya says to that. Shane presses his lips to the corner of his mouth before he moves away to catch the rest of the sentence. ”Being with me.”

He looks cracked open, for a moment. Shane's fingers twitch in his hair.

”Easiest thing I’ve ever done,” he tells him. ”You don’t think I can do it, then just fucking watch me, Rozanov.”

Ilya closes his eyes briefly, like it’s too much. ”Yes,” he says. ”Yes, I have been, solnyshko.” The smile that spreads across his face then is what Shane has been after. ”You’re on.”

*

After they spend a frankly ridiculous amount of time kissing in the hallway, Shane finally unsticks them from the front door, leads the still vulnerable-looking Ilya to the bedroom, palming his way through dark thresholds, strips them both efficiently and bundles them into bed. Fuck the shower, he thinks for what is perhaps the first time in his life. They can take one together tomorrow. He can survive without it if he gets to gather Ilya against him instead, look into his unguarded face and whisper sweet nothings against his temple until he, tired and lax, falls asleep. Shane is tired, too, like all the tension that’s accumulated in him has fizzled out and taken his energy with it. It’s okay. He closes his eyes.

They sleep and wake and sleep and wake, and sleep some more. In the morning, Shane squints against the sunlight falling into his eyes and listens to Ilya’s soft answering sound at his mumbled, ”Good morning.” They’ve done it before. It barely feels like it. They stumble into the bathroom, brush their teeth and then fog up the mirror with the steam from the shower they take together, where Ilya takes them both in hand and gets them off under the stream of too-warm water. Shane has to steady himself on Ilya’s shoulder so he doesn’t slip and crack his skull open on the bathroom tile. Ilya pulls him close.

He then glowers at the smoothie Shane makes for breakfast, like he does every time.

”It’s not for you, you big baby,” Shane reminds him, rolling his eyes. He takes a sip; it’s perfectly fine. He still refuses to keep Ilya’s preferred brand of the sugary abomination of a cereal at his place; instead, he makes a separate breakfast for him, quietly pleased when Ilya leaves him to the bacon and eggs he finds in the fridge and just busies himself with making coffee instead.

”And thank god for that,” Ilya says as the coffee machine whirrs to life. Shane likes watching him in the kitchen. Ilya moves through the space with the kind of familiarity that only comes from spending a certain amount of time somewhere. ”I wouldn’t drink it if you paid me.”

”Good thing I’m not planning on it,” he says. ”You seriously need to work out whatever vendetta you have against vegetables.”

”I don’t have vendetta,” Ilya tells him. ”Just working taste buds.”

Shane gives the greasy bacon in the pan a pointed look. ”Yeah? I honestly couldn’t tell.”

There is no tension in Ilya’s face left over from yesterday; in the morning after, he’s open and comfortable. He drifts closer to Shane with the carton of oat milk in hand and with his hair a mess. Shane reaches up and brushes his fingers through it, briefly, just to mess it up further, before Ilya skips out of his reach to back away from the stove. ”Bird food is still bird food, even liquid,” he announces. ”Admit you just want to steal some of my delicious breakfast for yourself, Hollander.”

”No, thanks.”

”No? But you steal everything else. My t-shirts.” He gives Shane a once-over. Then, he presses a hand to the centre of his chest. ”My heart.”

Embarrassingly, Shane feels himself flush. He tries to hide it with the turn of his head, with flipping the eggs in the pan. They sizzle noisily; he might steal some after all, maybe; Ilya would let him. It would be easier to defend himself against the t-shirt allegation if there wasn’t something in big, blocky Cyrillic printed across the back of it. He tugs at the soft cotton hem of it out of habit and feels a smile pull at his lips.

”No making fun of the person cooking for you, Rozanov,” he says.

Ilya, who just clicked the coffee machine off and has been halfway to raising his cup to his lips, blinks at him. ”That is a date night rule,” he says. It's very rare to hear Ilya Rozanov talk about rules in a context outside of breaking them. ”Are you saying this is a date, Hollander?” Which is a bit ridiculous, admittedly — how much it sounds like a challenge. Shane takes it up with a thrill.

”I hope so, yes,” he says earnestly. He turns off the stove. ”I hope it's— dating, for real this time. Just for us." He feels warm all over. "If you want.”

When he turns to Ilya fully, he finds him leaning against the counter, smiling quietly against the rim of his cup.

”Sounds nice,” Ilya tells him. ”I would like that.”

Anything you want, Shane thinks. All of it. And then he tells him out loud.