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Ilya loves Shane like this. Warm and happy, just a little less controlled than he normally is. To be fair, he’s been getting a lot better over the past year or so. Therapy has resulted in indulging in team meals, softening the macrobiotic diet, reacquainting himself (slowly) with some non-complex carbohydrates, and on nights like tonight, when there’s no game or morning practice the next day, a drink or two.
So yes, Ilya Rozanov loves when his husband can get a little wine drunk at dinner with their friends, and end up relaxed and a little giggly in his arms at the end of the night.
“God, I love kissing you,” Shane breathes against Ilya’s lips, the words slurring just a touch, either because of the alcohol or the headrush of touching like this. Shane shifts so he’s straddling Ilya’s lap, and on instinct, Ilya’s hands fall to his husband’s waist, encouraging the gentle rocking in his lap. Ilya is painfully hard, but that’s such a common occurrence in this household, he barely pays it any mind. More alluring is the way Shane kisses him, like he can’t decide between opening his mouth against Ilya’s and tangling their tongues, or leaving love bites up the column of his throat, or peppering gentle kisses across Ilya’s cheeks and nose. In moments like this, where Shane is so unguarded, Ilya can feel the force of Shane’s love for him, like it would crack Shane’s chest clean open if he didn’t have these physical release valves. It’s how Ilya knows, without a doubt, that they love each other equally.
"I can't believe we didn't kiss. Why didn't I kiss you? Why didn't you kiss me? Why didn't we kiss? We should've kissed. I love kissing you."
Ilya doesn't really know what his husband is talking about, since they certainly are kissing at the moment, and all evidence pointing toward both of them enjoying it immensely. When he’s able to surface from the sensation of Shane’s fingers pulling at the soft curls at the nape of his neck, Ilya’s eyes flutter open.
“Моё солнышко, I am kissing you right now, I promise,” he teases, letting go of Shane’s waist with one hand so he can tilt his chin toward the ceiling, trailing his lips up the column of Shane’s throat.
“Not now,” Shane rebuts rather seriously. Ilya doesn’t have to see his husband’s face to know there’s an adorable furrow between his brows, born of concentration and needing to correct an inaccuracy. “In Vegas.”
“Last summer?” Ilya asks, shivering as Shane’s nails score down his shoulder blades, scratching outward against the skin of his biceps and leaving trails in their wake. Fuck, he loved being covered in evidence of how much Shane needed him. “I think there is photo in newspaper of us kissing on stage presenting sportsmanship award again, моя любовь.”
“No,” Shane sighs, his voice breaking at the end as Ilya used his grip on one hip to urge him into rocking again, Shane’s cock hard against Ilya’s stomach in a way that made him feel lightheaded. “The first time. When you won MVP. We did…well, all that. But we didn’t kiss.”
The memory floods Ilya, so potent he can almost taste the hotel’s vodka in the back of his throat. He pushes Shane’s hips backward so he’ll settle on Ilya thighs and looks up at his husband, whose eyes are lined and shining. Shane’s fingers are back in Ilya’s hair, gently running his fingertips against his scalp. Ilya mimics the rhythm with gentle passes of his palms over Shane’s back, arms, thighs.
“I…” Ilya stumbles, moving his hand to cup Shane’s face when a tear threatens to fall. “I will make it up to you. The years, the kisses, all of it. Я клянусь.”
“You have nothing to make up for,” Shane murmurs in return, leaning into Ilya’s palm. Wine, Ilya has noticed, doesn’t just make Shane warm and comfortable physically. A glass or so often proceeds a revelation, sometimes small (I made a burner account after the first time you fucked me just so I could look up your interviews on twitter and not worry about accidentally liking something) and sometimes revolutionary in a way that changed Ilya’s understanding of what it meant to be loved (I want to have kids before we retire because I don’t want to wait for forever with you anymore).
Shane's expression shifts all of a sudden, his eyes lose focus for a second and not because of the wine, but because of a moment burned into his memory from years ago. "I almost sent you a text," Shane says looking at Ilya's lips. "In the elevator after I left the penthouse." His eyes look up to meet Ilya's gaze. "We didn't even kiss."
“What did it say?” Ilya asks, thumb dragging over Shane’s cheek, over his freckles. Ilya can’t help the little twitch of his smile as he watches them reveal themselves, dot by dot, from under his touch.
“That. We didn’t even kiss,” Shane admits, a gentle blush chasing Ilya’s thumb across his cheek.
“Why didn’t you? Send it?” Ilya asks, already knowing the answer. It’s reaffirmed by Shane’s little huff and accompanying eye roll.
“We weren’t…this,” he says, waving his hand between their two bodies, eyes bright and hair rumpled and clothes askew. “We weren’t anything back then. I felt like it would be too much.”
There’s a few heartbeats of silence between them that Ilya lets breathe, because he knows when Shane is done talking, and when he is not. And right now, there’s something lingering on his tongue.
“Somewhere deep inside, I knew if I said that, you’d see that I…felt something. Hell, it would have been admitting to myself that I wanted more than whatever we were,” Shane admits quietly, burying his lips in the curls at the crown of Ilya’s head as he speaks. “We couldn’t be that, yet.”
He and Shane have never said it out loud, but Ilya knows they were gone for each other long before he said Я тебя люблю in that Moscow alleyway. He probably wouldn’t have called it love back then, but there was a single-minded focus on Shane from the moment they met that always went beyond hockey. Ilya liked to think that there was a thread connecting the two of them, slowly being reeled inside each of their chests; it just took a while for the string to grow taut enough for either of them to recognize it for what it was.
So Shane was right. If he would have sent that text, Ilya likely would have downplayed it, even teased Shane about it. It might have unreeled that spool a little.
Or maybe it would have tugged at it. The way it did when Shane held him in that Tampa hotel room. Or when they had raced up the stairs to Shane’s condo the first time he fucked Shane properly.
“I did it on purpose,” Ilya admitted, surprising himself a little. Wine did not make him as loose-lipped as it did Shane, but his husband’s vulnerability was often his kryptonite, as Wyatt would say.
“Did what?” Shane asked, the words muffled by the way Shane still had his lips pressed to Ilya’s forehead. He looped his arms around Shane’s waist and spoke into the warm air between them.
“Didn’t kiss you,” he whispered, his accent thicker than it had been in years. Shane hummed, but gave Ilya the same space to speak that Ilya had given him. “I told myself it was not allowed. We had not talked for months, and I felt like inviting you to room was…weakness, in a way. I felt like I needed to let you go, because this could never be…well…”
Ilya trailed off, letting the wave of what this could never be hit him. Because in that Las Vegas hotel room, he thought he couldn’t even have pieces of Shane Hollander. Couldn’t have vulnerability, couldn’t have tenderness, couldn’t have care further than a good fuck and mututal release.
That night, which should have been the height of his career, didn’t hold a candle to the reality of his life now. And he couldn’t have even imagined this as a possibility then.
“I didn’t want to kiss you like I did in that bathroom. I wanted it to be like this,” Ilya started, nudging Shane to look down at him and capturing his lips in something slow. It wasn’t new, not for them, not with all these years of soft vulnerability between them, but it was still raw. Ilya kissed him like he was telling Shane a secret, like a confession, like last rites. The inside of his chest felt scraped open, and only their hands and lips and bodies on each other could soothe the sting of such a terrible need.
“If I kissed you that night, it would have been like that,” Ilya panted into Shane’s mouth, their lips a hairsbreadth apart. “And I didn’t think I could have that. We couldn’ be that. Yet.”
Ilya knew he was crying, but it didn’t matter. Shane had held him while he cried dozens of times since that Tampa All Stars weekend. Shane had witnessed every type of tear Ilya was able to produce—nostaglic ones and terrified ones, depressed ones and elated ones—and had kissed each and every one clear from his face.
“I know…” Shane stuttered, gasping as Ilya pulled him closer by his hips once again, both their cocks still hard between them. “I know I’m less comfortable with public affection than you are.”
“It is okay,” Ilya interrupted, shimmying Shane’s shorts and boxers down his hips. The carnal need didn’t mar the vulnerability in their words, it only compounded it, because Shane and Ilya’s bodies had known the truth about them long before their hearts and minds had. It had felt the tug of that string years before it was strung taut between them like a live wire. “Я знаю, что ты меня любишь.”
“Listen,” Shane insisted, swiftly unbuttoning Ilya’s shirt and running his palms over Ilya’s abdomen, making Ilya’s blood spark in his veins. “I know I tend to hesitate. When you touch me in front of other people. But I am working on it.”
Shane’s fingers make quick work of Ilya’s fly, gripping his cock over his boxers while he presses his forehead to his husband’s.
“I never want to miss another kiss. Especially because I’m afraid of peoples’ reactions,” Shane murmurs, pulling just far back enough to look Ilya in his eyes. “Let me make it up to you, too. The years, the kisses. Please.”
Shane is a little drunk, on this feeling and the wine as well, but Ilya can see in his eyes how much he means this.
And he can only nod as he feels that string wrap around the two of them, binding them together for a lifetime of kisses.