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Ilya sometimes thinks that a part of his soul is in this lake. That he left it behind here last summer, or perhaps it was waiting here all along, and he was without it until Shane asked him to the cottage and he was finally made whole.
He feels connected to this place in a way he never has been in the city, not in Moscow or in Boston. Each change in the weather is felt in his chest, like breath catching in his lungs. When the wind picks up across the water it sends an electric thrill down his spine, calling him to long hikes or swimming off the dock. And when the afternoon sun drips like honey from the sky, he lazes in the lap of the man he loves, warm and content down to his bones.
But today the weather is unseasonably cool, a thick bank of cloud washing out the sky into a dull grey without a hint of blue. And Ilya finds himself contemplative, sitting out on the lakeshore and yearning for something which can never be.
“Penny for your thoughts?”
Ilya’s body is moving to make space before he has even processed Shane’s presence. Shane sits down beside him, pressed together side-to-side, a line of warmth and comfort down Ilya’s side.
“What is this?” Ilya asks playfully. “You are a very rich man, Hollander, am I worth only pennies to you?”
Shane snorts, and presses his head into Ilya’s shoulder. It feels like his body was made for Shane to fit against.
“It’s a saying,” Shane protests. “I didn’t come up with it.”
“And yet you still offer me only pennies. You do not say, one thousand dollars for your thoughts…”
Then Ilya is distracted for a moment, because Shane scrunches his nose in annoyance and then Ilya has to kiss him. It’s gentle, a quick reminder of their love for one another, and exactly the kind of thing Ilya spent so long thinking he could never have.
Shane pulls back with a slightly worried look.
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” he says, softly.
Ilya shrugs a little helplessly.
“It isn’t happy thought,” he admits.
Shane says nothing. He simply stays sitting, his thumb rubbing back and forth a little where his hand rests on Ilya’s back. And that’s enough, because how can it not be?
“I was thinking of… regrets,” Ilya says, not quite sure where to start. The messy undifferentiated tangle of his thoughts is hard enough to unpick into any language, Russian or English. “The past. Things that could have been.”
“Your family?” Shane asks.
Ilya shakes his head. No, he has plenty of regrets there, of course, but that is not today’s ghost.
“Us. You.” he says simply. He reaches up to card his fingers through Shane’s hair. “Every time I said something cruel… or did not say the thing I was wishing to.”
Shane leans his head back a little into Ilya’s hand, and Ilya’s breath catches for a moment. It always does, even after a full year of being truly together.
“We both did plenty of that, I guess,” Shane observes. “Were you thinking of something in particular, or…?”
“Sochi,” Ilya answers.
“We barely saw each other in Sochi.”
Ilya levels him with a disbelieving look.
“Okay, yes, you were kind of a dick in Sochi,” Shane admits. “But not like, more so than any other time that year. So…?”
Ilya shakes his head. He almost can’t believe it, that the same words that have circled for years around the shadows of his mind like a predator waiting to pounce have slipped from Shane’s memory with no lasting impact.
“You wanted to check on me. To show you cared. And I told you to go.” He looks down at his hands. “I told you, we are not anything.”
“You were under a lot of pressure,” Shane says.
“I know. I remember.” Ilya’s voice is flat. “It is not that I do not know why I acted this way… but I think, sometimes… if I could have been braver, been more honest… maybe we could have had many more years like this. Much less heartache.”
Shane looks sideways at him. His eyes are full of compassion. But his mouth is twitching in that way he does when he is trying not to laugh, and after a moment, he breaks and turns away.
“You are laughing at my sorrow?” Ilya protests, not entirely seriously. “This is funny to you?”
“No, I’m sorry, I just… it’s very. Sweet. That you think we could have started dating at twenty-two without it being a total shitshow.” Shane shakes his head. “I don’t think I could even think the word ‘gay’ to myself back then. If you had asked me on a date I probably would have run for the hills.”
“You came looking for me,” Ilya pointed out. “You wanted to be… something to me, something more than a dirty secret.”
“Yeah, because I was twenty-two and you’d just given me the best orgasm of my life,” Shane retorts.
“And only that?” Ilya asks.
He’s genuinely uncertain of Shane’s answer. They haven’t spoken about it concretely, when things changed for them, when they started to become more than they thought they could be. Perhaps for Shane, it was later than Sochi – that is fine. It does not matter.
But Shane’s expression turns gentle.
“No. It wasn’t only – I had already started to feel things that I was trying very hard not to think about. I hadn’t admitted it to myself yet, but you already mattered to me, even then.” He swallows. “You?”
“I knew. First time I knew, just before Games.” He can remember it so vividly – not the sex, although that had been life-changingly good, but afterwards, kissing Shane goodbye at the door, feeling like he never wanted to pull away, never wanted to leave again. “I wanted something I couldn’t want, and it scared me. You scared me.”
“So you pushed me away,” Shane says, like he understands perfectly, which of course he does. They have always understood this about each other far too well, the agony of watching someone run from you down a path you have run before.
But they have always come back.
“I do, uh,” Shane starts, slowly. “I do have my own ‘what-if’, actually. Something I still think about, sometimes.”
Ilya makes a wordless noise of encouragement.
“You remember later that season, after the MHL awards… the year you won the cup.”
Yes, Ilya remembers that night. He could have a concussion so bad he forgets who the president is and still remember that night. Shane begging for him, just because Ilya told him to. Shane touching himself so Ilya could watch. Shane telling him “I need you”.
“Yes, I remember. Of course.” Then he remembers the rest of the conversation they’re having and. Oh. “You regret this?”
“No!” Shane says, emphatically. “No, not most of it. It was…”
“… Hot?” Ilya fills in, when he doesn’t finish his sentence.
“Intense,” Shane settles on. “You made me feel good, you always make me feel good. But. After we were done, things felt kinda. Weird.”
That night, Ilya had broken a six-month streak of pretending Shane didn’t exist in order to have sex so good he still jerked off to the memory years later, then gotten wasted on minibar vodka after Shane left because he didn’t want to think about having to fly home to Russia for the summer.
“Weird how?” he asks.
“You kicked me out after, and it felt like… like I could have been anyone. Like I was just the most convenient person for you to fuck.”
Guilt stabs Ilya through the chest.
“You could not have been anyone,” he immediately says, with passion. “It could only have been you. I win the Hart, and the only celebration I care about is Shane Hollander. You know this, da?”
“I know. I’m not telling you this to make you feel bad! The part I regret is that I didn’t ask for more. That I didn’t stay, or tell you I –”
He breaks off suddenly. Looks away. Ilya lets him take a few slow breaths.
“I almost texted you from the elevator,” Shane admits slowly. “I typed out the message, even, but I…”
“What was the message?” Ilya asks, low and urgent.
Shane is quiet for several long seconds. Then he sighs. “It was, ‘We didn’t even kiss.’”
Ilya surges towards him and presses their lips together, needing to be kissing Shane more than he needs air right now. Shane kisses him back, hands clinging to the front of Ilya’s T-shirt, both of them desperate – not heated or impassioned, but needing to feel each other’s presence, the comfort of knowing they love each other and are here, together, both okay.
“Ilya,” Shane breathes against his lips, and Ilya kisses the sound back into his mouth. He presses into Shane for several more lovely seconds, before Shane’s hand taps against his chest for him to stop.
“Ilya,” Shane repeats. “I didn’t tell you this because I need you to make up for it. You’ve kissed me a thousand times since then.”
“And that is enough?” Ilya prompts.
“… No…” Shane admits, and his reluctance to entertain the idea even in teasing makes Ilya preen and kiss the corner of his mouth. “But that wasn’t my point. The point is that I should have asked you for what I wanted. You would have kissed me, if I’d asked for it.”
“I would,” Ilya confirms, because even at his moodiest, he has never been able to refuse Shane Hollander anything.
“I know that now,” Shane says. Then he pauses. “No… it wasn’t that I didn’t know then, I was pretty sure you wouldn’t mind kissing me.” Ilya snorts softly at the understatement. “It was that if I asked, then it said something. It meant I had a reason for asking. And I felt like you would look at me – not even look, you would read my text, and know exactly why I wanted that from you.” Shane shakes his head, a rueful half-smile on his lips. “I didn’t even know why yet, but… you always seemed halfway inside my head, even when I didn’t want you to be.”
Ilya thinks about it. He definitely would have paid attention, if Shane had come back that night looking for kisses. Perhaps he would have been scared that Shane was looking for something Ilya didn’t know how to give. Perhaps he would have realised he wants the same thing I do. Perhaps both?
“… so I ran away,” Shane concludes, and oh. Ilya doesn’t need to know him better than anyone to know what he’s thinking of now.
The waves ripple on the lake, bands of light and shadow shifting on the water’s surface.
“Yes,” Ilya says. “That is another day I think of often. Think about what I could have said, or done…”
“It wasn’t anything you said,” Shane says quickly. Then he pauses for a moment. “Although I did wonder why you were talking to me about Svetlana. I kinda thought you were telling me that I should be fucking other people.”
Ilya groans, and drops his head against Shane’s shoulder.
“No,” he says. “You cannot be asking me this.”
“Can’t be asking you what?” Shane chuckles.
“You do not know why I tell you that I have friend, who is beautiful woman, who likes you very much.” Shane’s face is still blank. “Who has sex with me, sometimes. Who maybe would like to have sex with you too…?”
“Oh.” Shane blushes beautifully, right to the tips of his ears. “Really? That was you asking for a threesome?”
He lowers his voice on the last word, even though there is no-one but Ilya within ten miles. Ilya could not love him more if he tried.
“I was… testing the water.” Ilya waves a hand vaguely.
“I’m not having a threesome with Svetlana,” Shane says, profoundly unnecessarily.
“Da, I know. Could tell that day. You say ‘I like women’ and it sounds like worst lie ever told.”
Shane pouts, because he knows Ilya is telling the truth.
“So if I had not suggested this…?” Ilya asks.
“I don’t think it would have made a difference.” Shane sighs. “I don’t – I mean, I do regret running out that day, because it hurt you and I never want to hurt you. But I’ve never thought ‘what if I hadn’t’ because… I can’t imagine a version of me that stayed. If it hadn’t happened then, it would have happened sometime, you know?”
Ilya has just a few moments for the ache of that to settle in his chest, when Shane speaks again:
“I had to try walking away from you, to realise that all I wanted to do was go running back.”
And with that, all of the hurt melts away, and Ilya can only feel love surging in his chest, so strong it’s almost hard to breathe. Shane has a way of saying romantic things in a way so matter-of-fact there is no questioning them: the sun is bright, ice is cold, and Shane cannot imagine wanting to be anywhere but Ilya’s side.
Ilya buries his face in the side of Shane’s neck. Maybe his eyes are damp, but no-one can see, and the only person who will feel understands. Shane’s hand comes up to stroke his hair, gentle and slow. Ilya presses a soft kiss to Shane’s collarbone.
“That.” Ilya’s voice is rough. “That is what Sochi was, to me.”
Shane’s hand stills in his curls. “Even then?”
“I think so,” Ilya admits.
Shane turns his head, and presses a kiss to Ilya’s temple.
“I’m sorry I kept you waiting so long,” he murmurs against Ilya’s ear.
Ilya raises his head.
“It was worth waiting for,” he says, and he has never believed anything so much.
Shane smiles and presses their foreheads together.
“You were too,” he says. “Don’t – you don’t need to wish to be different. Maybe there’s another world where we figured our shit out sooner or we realised we were in love at eighteen and never broke each other’s hearts. That’s nice, but I don’t care. I don’t love those theoretical Ilyas. I love you. Ya tebya lyublyu. I love you.”
“Ya tozhe tebya lyublyu,” Ilya says back, and kisses him.
He takes a moment to let himself feel the wonder of it – that he can hear those words and say them back, natural as breathing, when for so many years it felt impossible to even dream of. That somehow, despite every mistake along the way, they made it here together. That they survived the past, and now they get to build a future together.
“You’re freezing, Hollander,” he says. “You have been sat outside too long.”
Shane splutters and starts chiding Ilya for letting himself get cold. (Ilya is not cold, he is Russian. He is only concerned about Shane.) He gets up and holds out a hand to help Ilya, who lets himself be pulled to his feet and towed back towards the cottage.
He stumbles along, cloud overhead and Shane grumbling in his ears, but all Ilya can see ahead is sunshine, shining golden and warm.