Chapter Text
The NHL Awards were exactly what they always were.
Loud. Expensive. Carefully staged to look spontaneous. A room full of professional athletes in suits that cost more than most people’s rent, performing a version of themselves that the cameras and the sponsors and the league office had collectively agreed was the version worth broadcasting. Shane had been doing this for a few years now, long enough to know how to be here without actually being here - the nod, the smile, the appropriate reaction at the appropriate moment, the practiced ease of a man comfortable in his own skin.
He was not comfortable in his own skin tonight.
He had known, somewhere in the back of his mind, that Rozanov would be here tonight. Of course he would be here - he’d just won the Stanley Cup and had the kind of season that generated a specific gravity of its own, pulling every camera and every question and every piece of available attention toward him like a natural force. He would be at the center of this the way he was at the center of everything he walked into, easy and magnetic and completely aware of the effect he was having and completely unbothered by it.
Shane had been managing his awareness of Ilya Rozanov since he’d met the man.
He was good at it, mostly. You got good at things you practised consistently, and Shane had practised this with the same focused discipline he brought to everything else - the deliberate calibration of attention, the careful maintenance of a face that gave nothing away, the internal architecture of compartmentalization that kept the thing between them in its designated space, which was: separate from everything that actually mattered.
But that had been before Sochi. Before six months of silence so complete it had the weight and texture of something intentional. Before Shane had spent the better part of a winter quietly restructuring his understanding of what exactly he had thought they were doing, and arriving, eventually, at an answer that he had not been comfortable to sit with.
He stood backstage, waiting for their turn to present the award for Sportsman-like Conduct, an irony that was not lost on him, while everyone around him was frantically wondering where Rozanov was, but he wasn’t anxious about it… absolutely not. He looked at his glass of water - he didn’t drink during the season, and technically the season was over, but he’d found over the years that he thought more clearly without it and tonight he wanted to think clearly - and he watched what rooms did when Ilya Rozanov entered them.
The shift was subtle. Just a reorientation. A small collective turning of attention toward a spot, the way plants turned toward light without deciding to.
Shane looked back at his water.
He was fine. He had been fine for six months. He was going to continue being fine for the remainder of this evening, and then he was going to go back to his room and sleep, and tomorrow he was going to fly back to Montreal and deal with the thing he had not yet decided to deal with - the trade rumors that had been circling for weeks, quiet enough that they hadn’t been confirmed yet, present enough that he could feel them the way you felt weather before it arrived. He still wasn’t sure what was in store for his future in the NHL, now that he’d failed to secure the Stanley Cup for Montreal before Rozanov managed to secure it for Boston, he only knew that there were whispers about a restructuring and new leadership throughout the organization. Nothing concrete. Nothing official. He’d quietly reached out to his agent to give her a heads up on what he’d been able to parse together, but he hadn’t said anything to anyone else yet.
One thing at a time.
He was fine.
He was acutely aware of the other man when he came to a stop behind him, and he looked in his direction, irritated by the casual smirk on his face. He scowled.
“Looking for me?”
“Fuck, Rozanov. What the fuck? We’re on in like five seconds!”
Ilya looked entirely unbothered by this information. “Fifty seconds,” he said, with the particular ease of a man who had never once in his life experienced a consequence for being late to anything. “We are fine.”
Shane stared at him. “Does it matter to you at all that everyone backstage has been having a heart attack looking for you?”
“Not really.”
It was the not really that did it - the complete, cheerful absence of concern, delivered in that accent with that expression, like the mild inconvenience of an entire production staff was simply not a category of thing Ilya Rozanov was required to engage with. Shane felt something hot move through his chest that he identified immediately as irritation and was not going to identify it as anything else.
And it didn’t help that Ilya Rozanov being in a suit was profoundly unfair.
Shane had developed what he considered a reasonable working relationship with his own attraction to the Russian center over the course of the five years he had known him, which was to say: he acknowledged its existence, he managed its expression, and he kept it in the compartment where it lived and visited it only under controlled circumstances. This had served him well. It was not a solution, exactly, but it was a functional arrangement.
The suit was a complication.
It wasn’t even a particularly unusual suit - dark, well-cut, the kind of thing that looked expensive without announcing it. But Rozanov wore things the way he did everything, with an ease that made it look like the suit had been designed around him specifically, like the alternative had never been considered. And he was standing close enough that Shane could smell whatever he was wearing, something faint and specific that his memory had filed away from the last time they had been this close, which was months ago now, in a context that Shane was not going to think about.
I’m fine, he had said
He was fine.
“Where were you, anyway?” he snarled, because he needed to say something that was the safest available option.
Ilya’s mouth curved. “Busy.” He was watching him with the expression he sometimes wore that Shane could never fully decipher - not quite a smirk, not quite anything readable, something in the eyes that did whatever it did and that Shane had spent five years either responding to or walking away from, alternating between the two with what he was not proud to admit was an inconsistency that bordered on embarrassing.
One word. Completely uninformative. Delivered with the specific quality of someone who knew exactly what busy was going to imply to the person receiving it and had chosen it deliberately.
Shane’s jaw tightened. “Oh yeah? With who?”
The question came out before he could stop it, sharper than he intended, with an edge that had no business being there. He heard it land in the air between them and felt the immediate, specific discomfort of having revealed something he had not meant to reveal - not because it was true, because it wasn’t, it was just irritation, it was purely irritation - but because Ilya’s eyes moved to his face with the particular attention of someone who had just been handed something interesting and was deciding what to do with it.
He was saved, mercifully, by the floor manager appearing at Ilya’s shoulder.
“You’re on,” she said, with the clipped urgency of someone who had spent the last six minutes in a controlled panic and was not yet sufficiently recovered to be polite about it.
“We’re on,” Ilya said, to Shane, like this was information he was passing along rather than a situation he had caused, and turned toward the stage with the easy confidence of a man who had not spent the last thirty seconds being jealous - not jealous, irritated, there was a meaningful difference and Shane understood it clearly - of a word.
Shane followed him out, glaring.
Busy, he thought, one more time, in the particular way you returned to a bruise.
The moment they cleared the stage Shane was moving.
Not running - he was not going to run, he was a professional and he had years of muscle memory telling him how to exit a stage with composure - but walking with the kind of focused velocity that left no room for conversation or eye contact or anything except the corridor ahead of him and the door at the end of it.
He needed thirty seconds. Just thirty seconds in a room where nobody was looking at him.
The hand had been on his back for approximately five seconds.
He had counted.
It had started as something that could have been explained away - a natural placement, the kind of incidental contact that happened when two people stood shoulder to shoulder to take a selfie… at a podium in front of a room full of people and cameras. Shane had registered it and filed it and kept his face exactly where it needed to be, because he was good at this, because he had been good at this for a while now, because the entire architecture of what he and Rozanov were to each other in public rested on his ability to be good at this.
And then the hand had moved.
Not dramatically. Not in any way that would have registered on camera, or to anyone standing more than two feet away. Just - lower. A slow, deliberate slide that stopped just above the line of what could still technically be called his back, resting there with a light, specific pressure that communicated something Rozanov had absolutely no right to communicate in the middle of the NHL awards with so many cameras and the entire league watching.
Shane kept smiling. That bastard.
He had kept his voice even when they read the nominees. He had laughed at the appropriate moment when Rozanov made the joke that the writers had given him, because he delivered it with that accent and that timing and the room had loved it, and Shane had stood beside him and smiled and felt the warm weight of Ilya’s hand and wanted, with a specificity that was genuinely alarming, to be anywhere else in the world.
Not because he didn’t want it.
That was the problem. That had always been the problem.
He pushed through the door of the backstage bathroom and let it swing shut behind him and stood in the sudden quiet of it - marble, ambient light, the engineered hush of expensive Vegas silence - and put both hands on the edge of the sink and looked at himself in the mirror and did a thorough, honest inventory of the situation.
He had spent six months building something solid. Six months of quiet, deliberate reconstruction - of his expectations, his understanding of what they were, the careful dismantling of the habit of wanting things from Ilya Rozanov that he was not going to give him. He had done good work. He had arrived tonight prepared, composed, ready to be in the same room as the man and feel exactly what he felt and manage it the way he always managed it, cleanly and without incident.
And then the bastard had put his hand on his back on a stage in front of the entire league and moved it approximately four inches downward and in five seconds Shane’s careful architecture had developed a significant structural problem.
He turned on the cold tap.
He was twenty-three years old. He was the captain of the Montreal Voyageurs. He was - probably - about to be traded, which was a thing he had not told anyone yet and was not going to think about right now because there was already enough happening in his chest without adding that to it. He was standing in a bathroom at the NHL Awards because Ilya Rozanov had touched the small of his back and he had needed to leave the building in any way available to him, which was not - this was not who he was. He was not the person who fled into bathrooms because of a hand on his back.
He was also, apparently, exactly that person tonight.
He heard the door.
He didn’t turn around.
He already knew.
Of course he already knew - because this was how it always went, because Rozanov had some specific and infuriating radar for the moments when Shane was least prepared for him, because the universe had apparently decided that Shane Hollander’s particular form of suffering was being found in bathrooms by the one person capable of making everything significantly worse and significantly better at the same time, and had arranged tonight accordingly.
The soft, final click of the lock.
Shane looked at himself in the mirror.
Get it together, he thought, with some urgency.
He was almost sure he wasn’t going to.
He heard Rozanov cross the bathroom behind him. He didn’t turn around. He kept his eyes on his own reflection and his hands on the edge of the sink and focused on the particular discipline of not reacting, which he had been practicing all evening with diminishing returns.
The other man stopped somewhere behind his left shoulder. Shane could see him in the mirror if he let himself look, which he wasn’t going to do, because looking at Ilya Rozanov in a mirror in a locked bathroom was not going to help anything.
The silence stretched.
It had a specific quality to it, the silence between them - it always had, even on the ice, even in the press corridors where they performed mutual antagonism for cameras. It was never empty. It was the silence of two people who had too much history to fill a room with nothing and both knew it.
“Well?” Ilya said.
Shane looked up.
His eyes met Rozanov’s eyes in the mirror and immediately regretted it, because the Russian was watching him with that expression - the one that wasn’t quite a smirk and wasn’t quite anything Shane had ever been able to fully decode, the one that infuriatingly lived somewhere between amusement and want and something underneath both of those things that he’d never let stay on his face long enough to be identified.
He turned around.
“Well, what?” He snapped, and his voice was sharper than he’d intended, which was happening a lot tonight, which was information he was going to ignore. “What do you want from me, Rozanov?!”
The man in question looked at him for a moment. Something moved through his expression - something that Shane caught and lost in the same instant - and then he glanced down at the floor and back up and said, with the complete, easy confidence of a man who had never once considered that this might not be a reasonable thing to say:
“Are you not going to suck my dick?”
Shane stared at him.
The words took a moment to fully arrive, they way certain impacts did - you felt the collision before the pain registered. And then they arrived completely, and Shane understood them not just as words but as everything underneath them - the six months of silence, the hand on his back on the stage, busy, the locked door, all of it assembling into a single, clarifying picture of exactly what Rozanov thought this was and exactly what he though Shane was within it.
Available. Unchanged. Waiting. Dispensible.
The anger that moved through him was clean and specific and had been a long time building.
“Fuck you!” He hissed. “Why don’t you suck mine?!”
Something flickered in Rozanov’s expression. Not the reaction Shane had expected - not irritation, not the escalation of the push-and-pull that had always been their native language - but something more careful. More attentive. Like Shane had said something that required closer reading than the words themselves.
He reached out.
His fingers found Shane’s jaw with a lightness that had nothing in common with the pointed deliberateness of the hand on his back, a touch so different in quality that it short-circuited something in Shane’s chest before he could stop it. This was not provocation. This was - something Shane did not have a safe word for, something that lived in a part of Rozanov he only ever showed behind locked doors, in the spaces where performance fell away.
“Maybe ask nice,” Ilya said, quietly.
And Shane - god help him - almost did.
Almost, because the touch was still on his jaw and Rozanov was close enough that Shane could feel the warmth of him and there was a version of this that his body remembered very clearly and wanted with an urgency that had nothing to do with sense or self-preservation. Almost, because six months of careful reconstruction had apparently not been quite enough to fully dismantle the specific pull of Ilya Rozanov in a locked room with that expression on his face.
Then Rozanov kissed him.
It was hard and a little unsteady and more urgent than it was usually like, like the six months had cost Rozanov something too, like the wanting had built up somewhere he hadn’t fully managed, and Shane felt it land in his chest and felt his hands come up - one against the other man’s chest, not pushing, just present - and kissed him back.
For a moment.
Several moments.
Long enough that the careful architecture of his evening did not so much develop a structural problem as it ceased to exist entirely.
And then something shifted. Not a decision - he had stopped being able to make clean decisions approximately forty-five seconds into standing at a podium when Rozanov’s hand slid down his back - but a recognition. The specific, physical recognition of a limit he had crossed before and understood the cost of, a place where the thing he was doing and the thing he had spent six months understanding about himself stopped being reconcilable.
He pulled back.
Rozanov looked at him. Close enough that Shane could see exactly what was moving through his expression - confusion, recalibration, the beginning of something that hadn’t fully formed yet.
“No,” Shane said.
The word came out quiet. Steady in a way that surprised him, given that nothing else about his internal state was remotely steady. He was not angry anymore - or he was, somewhere underneath, but the anger had burned down into something that felt, uncomfortably, like clarity.
“Hollander–”
“No.” He took a step back. Put space between them that felt necessary in the specific way that necessary things sometimes felt terrible. “I can’t… I can’t keep doing this.”
Rozanov’s expression shifted. “What does that mean?”
“It means no,” Shane said. He held the Russian’s gaze and felt the pull of him again - the specific, exhausting, constant pull that had not diminished by a single degree over six months of silence, which was its own type of hell - and stood in it and did not move. “It means I’m done.”
“You are done?” Roznov repeated, slowly, like he was translating something.
“Yeah.” Shane picked up his jacket from where it had ended up on the counter. He didn’t remember putting it there. The last several minutes had a slightly blurred quality at the edges. He looked at Rozanov one more time - at the confusion in his face, the thing underneath the confusion that Shane was not going to let himself look too closely at - and felt something that was not quite grief and not quite relief settle into his chest alongside everything else.
“I’m done,” He said again. Quieter this time. Not for Rozanov. For himself.
He reached for the door.
“What does that mean?”
It wasn’t a question. It was the particular flat delivery that Rozanov used when something had landed and he hadn’t decided what to do with it yet - not angry, not dismissive, just very still in the way he got when he was paying close attention and didn’t want you to know he was.
Shane’s hand stayed on the door handle.
“It means what I said,” He huffed, without turning around.
“You say you are done.” A pause. “Dont with what, exactly?”
Shane turned around.
Rozanov was watching him with that careful stillness, arms at his sides, the confusion in his face having resolved into something more focused and considerably harder to look at. Shane looked at him and felt the full, specific weight of the evening - the backstage corridor, the stage, the hand on his back, the locked door, all of it - and felt something that had been sitting compressed in his chest for six months begin to move.
“This,” Shane said as he gestured between them, a short frustrated motion. “Whatever this is. This - thing that we’ve been doing.”
“This thing,” Rozanov repeated.
“Yeah.” Shane’s voice was coming out harder than intended, which was happening because the alternative was it coming out as something he wasn’t going to let it come out as… something vulnerable. “This thing where you disappear for six months and then show up like nothing appended and expert me to just - pick up where we left off like I’ve just been sitting here and waiting for you.”
Something shifted in Rozanov’s expression. “I did not–”
“You did,” Shane hissed. “That’s exactly what you did. You walked up to me tonight like six months was nothing. Like what you said to me in Sochi was nothing. Like I was nothing. And then you followed me in here and you–” He stopped. Pressed his lips together. Looked at the ceiling briefly and then back at Rozanov because he was not going to look at the ceiling while he said this. “You told me to suck your dick, Rozanov.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“I know what I did,” he said, carefully.
“Do you?” Shane spat. “Because from where I’m standing it looks like what you did was decide that after six months of complete silence I would still be - available to you. Like nothing between us had any weight to it. Like I’m just–” He stopped again, jaw tight, working through the words. “Like I’m something you can put down and pick back up whenever it’s convenient for you.”
“That is not–” he started.
“That’s exactly what it looks like to me!” Shane’s voice cracked slightly on the last word, not dramatically, just at the edge of it, and he felt the crack and kept going because stopping now would be worse. “Do you have any idea what the last six months have been like? Watching you just - not. Not text, not acknowledge me, not anything. After Sochi. After–” He stopped. He was not going to finish that sentence. “I spent six months feeling like a complete idiot for expecting anything at all, and then you show up tonight and you put your hand on my back on that stage–”
“Hollander–”
“-and you follow me in here and you act like it’s all completely normal, like nothing needs to be explained or addressed or–” He exhaled sharply. “I don’t know what this is between us. I have genuinely never known what this is. But I know what it’s not supposed to feel like, and it’s not supposed to feel like this. Like being used.”
The word landed in the room and stayed there.
Rozanov’s expression had done something complicated - a series of movements Shane couldn’t fully track, something that moved through his face too quickly to name. His jaw was tight. He looked, for just a moment, like a man who had been handed a picture of himself he didn’t recognize and was trying to reconcile it with the one he had in his head.
“I do not think of you this way,” he said. The words came out carefully, deliberate, like he was placing them. “Like something to be used.”
“Then what do you think of me as?” Shane said. “Because from here it looks like you think of me as a toy that you can pick back up whenever you feel like it. So tell me. What am I to you, Rozanov? What is this?”
The Russian looked at him.
The silence stretched long enough that Shane felt the familiar, specific humiliation of having asked a question he already knew the answer to - of having said the true thing out loud and been met with silence, which was its own kind of answer.
“It is–” Rozanov started. Stopped. Something moved across his face that Shane had never seen there before, something that looked uncomfortably like someone trying to reach for something they didn’t have the language for yet. “It is not nothing.” He said at last. “To me. You are not - nothing.”
Shane stared at him.
You are not nothing. That was what he had. After six months of silence and a smirk like he expected Shane to fall to his knees on a dirty bathroom floor and this entire disaster of an evening, that was what Ilya Rozanov was able to give him. You are not nothing.
The anger came back, quieter this time and somehow worse for it.
“That’s not an answer,” Shane hissed.
“I know.” Rozanov’s voice was low, raw. “I know it is not answer. I am - am trying to say something and I do not–” He stopped. Made a short frustrated gesture with one hand that Shane had never seen from him before, a crack in the composure, something genuinely unscripted. “There are things I should have said. In Sochi. After Sochi. I know this.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
No answer.
“Why didn’t you say them?” Shane said. “Why didn’t you text? Why didn’t you - why did you just ignore me? For six months, Rozanov, you did nothing. And now you’re standing in a bathroom telling me I”m not nothing, which is–” He laughed, a short humorless sound. “Thats the bar? I’m not nothing? That’s what six months gets me?”
“Hollander–”
“I’m done talking about this,” Shane said. He picked up his jacket. His hands were steadier than they had any right to be. “I’m going back out the ceremony.”
Rozanov was quiet for a moment. Then he said, in the same careful deliberate way he’d said everything in the last few minutes that had landed wrong: “Fourteen-twelve.”
Shane stopped.
“My room,” he said. “Fourteen-twelve. If you want to - continue.”
Shane turned to look at him.
He stood there for a moment, looking at Rozanov’s face - at the careful steadiness of it, the thing underneath the steadiness that Shane could see and could not name and was too tired and too hurt to try to name tonight - and felt the pull of him, one more time, the specific exhausting pull that apparently six months and a locked bathroom and everything he had just said out loud was not sufficient to extinguish.
He turned back toward the door.
“Good luck tonight, Rozanov,” he said. “On the MVP award.”
He walked out.
The corridor hit him with noise and light and the business of people who had no idea what had just happened, and Shane moved through it without stopping, his jacket over one arm, his jaw set, the number fourteen-twelve sitting in his head like something he was going to spend the rest of the night thinking about.
You are not nothing.
He couldn’t go back to the ceremony. He couldn’t risk anyone being able to read his expression in a way that he wasn’t ready for yet. He couldn’t risk questions. If anyone asked him tomorrow where he was, he’d tell them he started feeling sick and had to go lie down… at least it wasn’t a complete lie. His teammates would probably just assume that standing in such close proximity to Rozanov, his vicious rival that he hated so much, had made him physically ill. They didn’t have to know that his reaction had nothing to do with hatred. It was– no, he wasn’t going to think about that. There was no room for that kind of thinking… especially not now. Especially after Rozanov had made it very clear what Shane had meant to him… not nothing.
Congratulations, Hollander, he thought to himself bitterly. You made it a step above nothing…
He took the elevator to his floor.
He was not going to go to room fourteen-twelve.
He was absolutely not going to go to room fourteen-twelve tonight.
He let himself into his room and sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the wall, and felt the full weight of the evening settle over him - the six months, the stage, the bathroom, all of it - and understood, with the particular clarity of someone who had finally said the true things out loud and found that saying them hadn’t fixed anything, that he was going to be carrying this for a while yet.
His phone buzzed on the nightstand.
He didn’t pick it up.
Fourteen-twelve.
He lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling and did not think about it, and thought about it anyway, the way you thought about things you had specifically instructed yourself not to think about, which was to say: constantly, and with great detail, and without any of the distance you had been hoping for.
He had come to Vegas with a question.
It was not a question he had told anyone about - not Hayden, not his agent, not his mother, not anyone - because it was the kind of question that required a certain amount of privacy to even formulate, the kind that lived in the space between what you admitted to yourself at two in the morning and what you were willing to say out loud in the daylight. He had carried it through the flight to Vegas and through the awards show and through the backstage corridor and busy and the stage and the hand on his back, and he had arrived at the bathroom with it still unanswered and had hoped, in the specific way you hoped for things you weren’t ready to admit you were hoping for, that something in that room would answer it for him.
The question was simple.
Was there something here worth staying close to, or did he need to go?
His agent had been fielding quiet interest from several teams for the better part of a month, ever since he’d told her about the rumors. Quietly of course. Shane loved Montreal, he truly did, but he didn’t want to be left with his pants around his ankles when Montreal decided it was time to move on; he also didn’t want to burn a bridge in case they were just that… rumors. He knew things like this happened all the time, that organizations restructured after something they’d hoped for hadn’t panned out. He knew that his rookie contract was coming up for renewal, and he knew that Montreal didn’t have to renew it. He knew that the rumors were circulating because he understood things went into motion before they were announced or anyone was made officially aware there was anything even happening in this business. His gut told him they weren’t just rumors, that his contract wasn’t going to be renewed. The only question was where he landed, and his agent had told him, carefully and professionally, that he had more input in the process than players usually did, that his value was high enough that he could reasonably advocate for a destination.
He had been sitting on that information.
Sitting on it because the answer to where he wanted to go was tangled up in a question he hadn’t been ready to ask, which was whether Ilya Rozanov was a reason to stay in the Eastern Conference or a reason to leave it entirely.
If tonight had gone differently - if the bathroom had gone differently, if you are not nothing had been followed by something that had actually meant something, if Ilya had for once in his life found the words for the thing that Shane had always been able to feel underneath all the deflection and the locked doors and the six months of silence - then he would have called his agent tomorrow and told her Eastern Conference, Atlantic Division. Close. Within reach. The kind of geography that left room for something to develop into whatever it was going to develop into.
But tonight had gone differently.
Tonight had gone exactly the way Shane should have known it was going to go, which was to say: Ilya had given him the minimum. You are not nothing. A room number. The bare architecture of a door left open without any of the honesty that would have made walking through it possible.
Shane stared at the ceiling.
Colorado had come up in conversation a lot over the past month. It was an up and coming all-star team. There were a lot of guys on the team that made it something special. Having him would just make them stronger, he knew that. It was a different conference and a different part of the continent, it would give him a clean break… but it would also isolate him completely from everyone that he knew and loved. That felt more like a punishment for him than anything helpful. But… Carolina had come up twice in conversations his agent had relayed. A team in transition, building toward something, a coaching staff that wanted a center with his specific skill set. Same conference, different division - he’d see Boston maybe three or four times a season instead of the constant rotation of the Atlantic. Enough distance to breathe. Not so much that it felt like running.
It felt, lying on a hotel bed in Vegas at two in the morning with fourteen-twelve still sitting in his head, like exactly the right amount of distance.
He reached for his phone.
He didn’t call his agent - it was two in the morning and she would answer, she always answered, but this wasn’t a two in the morning phone call. This was a decision that deserved daylight and a clear head, neither of which he currently had.
He opened her contact and looked at her name on the screen and felt the decision settle into him the way decisions settled when they had been made before you consciously made them - quietly, without drama, with the particular weight of something that was already true.
Carolina.
He put the phone face down on the nightstand.
Fourteen-twelve, he thought, one last time, with the specific exhausted finality of someone closing a door.
He closed his eyes.
He was not going to room fourteen-twelve.
And tomorrow he was going to call his agent and tell her to make the calls, and the question he had carried to Vegas was going to have its answer, and the answer was going to be: distance. Enough to breathe. Enough to stop waiting for something that Ilya Rozanov did not yet know how to give.
If he was going to be not nothing to Rozanov, then he was also not going to be something to him.
It wasn’t what he had wanted the answer to be. Honestly, he hadn’t been sure what he’d wanted the answer to be at all.
But it was the answer that he had.
He didn’t sleep for a long time.