Chapter Text
Shane takes his job as a senior aquarist at Aquarium Métropolitain very seriously. Which is why he’s just as surprised as you are to find himself on his knees in front of Ilya Rozanov in the North Atlantic exhibit, the Russian’s broad shoulders leaning against a column of moon jellyfish drifting in a swirl of indigo blue.
It’s hard to think about anything with Ilya’s dick right there for the taking, but there is a little part of him thinking this is not what his boss meant when she told Shane to make sure the jellies were adjusting to their new home before he left for the day. At least the exhibit doesn’t have cameras installed yet.
“Is fine, Hollander.” Ilya’s fingers thread through his hair, squeezing gently until Shane focuses on him again. “They are jellyfish, yes? They can’t see.”
“Actually…” Shane says. And he hates that he is this person, especially that he is this person in this situation, but he is this person. “They can.”
And how did he find himself here, where he absolutely shouldn't be, concerned about all the wrong things, you ask? Well, it all started with a missing bed, a marriage of (in)convenience, and temporary custody of a crocodile an alligator named Chompy.
Shane watched through the rearview mirror as the man who must be Ilya Rozanov approached, roller bag in tow. His arm was slung across the shoulders of a pretty girl, his face half-buried in her black curls as he whispered something in her ear. Whatever he said made her laugh before she pinched his side. They stopped at the tailgate and talked. And talked. As though Shane hadn’t already been waiting in a no-parking zone for twenty minutes.
Shane rolled down his window, prepared to do some performative throat clearing to get their attention, just as the guy took the girl’s face tenderly between his palms. And so instead of saying anything—he could no longer remember what it was he had been about to say—Shane watched as the man who must be Ilya bent to kiss the forehead, and then the nose, and then the lips of this mystery woman. It would be days before Shane would understand why, watching that most tender of exchanges, his mouth had gone dry. In the moment, he settled on honking the horn.
Which was, perhaps, an overreaction.
The girl said something in a language he did not understand; her eye roll was easier to translate. And then finally his tailgate was opened, luggage was loaded, final goodbyes were exchanged, and Ilya landed with a huff in the passenger seat.
“You’re thirty minutes late.”
“You must be Shane.” His accent was surprising, clearer and softer than Shane had expected when he’d mentioned, in their brief exchange of messages in the online forum, that he had only moved from Russia three years ago.
“Yeah. Shane Hollander. What gave it away?”
“The messages you sent. You seemed like person who honks the horn.”
Shane didn’t like that assessment at all.
“Well, lucky for us, in your messages, you seemed like someone who runs late, so I built in some extra time.”
Ilya rolled his eyes. Shane wondered what was wrong with this guy? He had left his apartment in Montreal two hours early to make a detour to Ottawa en route to Buffalo. He could not imagine rolling his eyes at someone he just met. Especially someone who was doing him a favor.
“What is this car, anyway?” Ilya asked with obvious scorn.
“It’s a Jeep.”
Ilya smiled. Shane did not understand what was so amusing. “What, you like to get into the spirit?”
“Huh?” Shane had saved a little from every single paycheck he’d ever earned to buy this Jeep. It was a good car.
“You are zookeeper going to zookeeper conference in a Jeep. It’s like… stereotype.”
“Oh.” Shane turned the key in the ignition. “I work at an aquarium.”
Ilya’s smile grew impossibly wider as he buckled his seatbelt. “Okay.”
Shane pulled out of the no-parking zone and worked his way south toward the highway. It was going to be a long five hours.
They were about thirty minutes down the highway when Ilya pulled a CD case out of his backpack, flipped a few pages, and slid a disc out of the top sleeve and held it up.
“I have music. Okay?”
Shane nodded. He wasn’t much of a music listener, so he’d put Ilya in charge of music when they made their arrangements. The car’s subpar sound system began to rattle with the heavy electronic beats of the first song, if ‘song’ was even the word for this sort of noise.
“Is this Russian?” Shane asked when the lyrics started. He couldn’t tell if they were in a foreign language or merely incomprehensible over the beat.
“Yes. Is what I have on short notice.”
“It’s fine.” And it was fine. Really, most music was just noise to Shane. This was just… extra noisy.
After the fourth track, distinguishable from the previous three only by the number ticking up on the radio display, Shane turned the volume down.
“So… was that your girlfriend?”
Ilya chuckled. “No.”
“Oh.”
More Russian noise.
“She is my wife.”
Shane’s eyes flicked from the road to Ilya’s hands. Sure enough, there was a simple gold wedding band on his ring finger. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-three.” Shane had to fight to keep the car in its lane. Shane was twenty-three. They weren’t old enough for… for wives.
“And you’re already married?”
Ilya gave him a long look, which is when Shane realized he had forgotten to transfer any of those clarifying questions into a tone of polite curiosity.
“Sorry, just… Aren’t you kind of young to be married?”
Ilya shrugged. “Is not like normal marriage. Is for citizenship.”
“Oh.” The static in his brain melded with the heavy bass of Ilya’s Russian techno. He snuck another glance. “Should you have told me that?”
Ilya grinned. “No. Probably not.”
“Oh.” Then, far too many minutes later, he added, “I won’t tell anyone.”
“Okay.” Then, far too many minutes later, he added, “Thank you.”
“So, is this your first AZA Conference?” Shane asked, about an hour in.
“Yes.” Ilya tapped his fingers against his knee.
The CD cycled back to track one, and Ilya pulled his CD folio from between his feet and searched until he found another album. It was more upbeat maybe. Or at least less nerve-shredding.
Ilya speared a finger through the hole of the previous CD and flipped through his cd folio, looking for its original sleeve. This was the first thing Ilya had done all day that Shane liked, putting the CD back in its place instead of wherever the new one came from. Like each one had a place. He wondered if they were sorted alphabetically. Or maybe by genre? Most to least angry-sounding? Ilya must have found the right spot, because he pulled his finger from the hole and slid the disc behind the plastic film.
Ilya’s hands were really nice. His nails were a little beat up; the nail on his middle finger had a groove like it had grown back over an injury. He had another light scar at the base of his thumb. His fingers were long and kind of thick for how nimble they were. Which made sense, because all of Ilya was long, and kind of thick, like the kind of thick that comes from physical labor, and that made Shane wonder if his—
The rumble strip jittered under the passenger side tires, and he yanked the car back to the center of the road.
“Sorry.”
Ilya waved off his apology with one of those very nice hands. “Is your first time at AZA?”
“I went to the Atlanta one during college.”
Ilya nodded. The sun was higher in the sky now. It turned his medium brown curls golden. Shane wondered if those curls were as soft as they looked, and then he wondered why the hell he was thinking about Ilya’s curls at all. Because Shane was—
Because Ilya had a wife.
“I’m not really a conference person,” Shane continued, forcing himself to concentrate on the road. “But since one of the focus areas this year is renovating aging facilities, my director decided to send me. We’re starting a big renovation next year. We have to move a bunch of species, drain like three million gallons of water.”
“Wow.” Ilya sounded unimpressed, but Shane was kind of getting used to that.
“Anyway, the only other people going from the aquarium are, like, the director and curators and stuff. They have a bunch of extra meetings so… I think I’m mostly on my own.”
Ilya nodded. Shane didn’t know why Ilya’s clipped responses bothered him so much. He just got the feeling Ilya was the kind of person who would have a lot to say if he wanted to, so it was irritating that he didn’t seem to want to. It wasn’t like there was anything else to do.
“What about your… zoo, right? Did they pay to send you?”
“No.” Ilya shrugged. “But I wanted to go. I think maybe I am… what you called it? A conference person?”
“Oh,” Shane said. Then, unsure of what else to say to that, added, “Cool.”
They were ten minutes farther down the road when Ilya asked, “Do you ever go to Stereo?”
“What’s Stereo?”
“A club in Montreal.”
“Oh.” Shane laughed. It was a laughable thought. “No, definitely not.”
“Datcha?”
“Is that Russian?”
“It’s a club.”
“Oh. No, I haven’t been there either.”
Shane could feel his assessing gaze on him as he tried to think of a place Shane might have been.
“Club Unity?”
“Uh, once I guess. My friend Rose wanted to go.” A few weeks after they’d broken up, Rose had dragged him out to the Gay Village. For some reason, she was determined to go there specifically, even though Shane didn’t see what was so fun or different about that club. She seemed to get hit on by everyone everywhere they went. “I don’t know if I’m really a club person.”
Ilya looked at him like ‘not a club person’ was an undiscovered species. “So what the fuck do you do in Montreal?”
“Work.” Ilya made a disparaging noise. Shane tried harder. “I go running in the parks. There’s a big farmer’s market by my apartment. The library. Watch hockey. We have museums, too.” Shane shrugged. He didn’t have trouble filling his time.
“Wow. Fun.”
Shane thought so. Enough of the time, anyway. And who was having fun all of the time?
He checked the clock. They had a long way to go.
“Have you been to the Museum of Nature?” Shane asked, after another twenty minutes. Ottawa had great museums.
“No.”
Maybe he was into art. “What about the National Gallery?”
“No.”
“Bank of Canada Museum? That’s my parents’ favorite.”
“No.”
“The War Museum?”
“I am not boring. I have not been to museums.”
“So then… what do you do in Ottawa?”
“Good question. I will let you know if I find answer.”
“We’re not going to a rest stop. They’re hotbeds of criminal activity. And disgusting.” They had been arguing over this for five minutes.
“A gas station then,” Ilya said.
“They had restrooms at the border crossing. What was wrong with those?”
“I prefer to pee without the supervision of American border patrol.”
After witnessing the scrutiny of his Russian passport, his Canadian residency paperwork, the questions, the additional agent with more questions, Shane was not quite stubborn enough to argue with that.
They went to a rest stop.
Shane stood by the jeep and waited. The rest stop was surrounded by trees. He kept a pair of binoculars in the car, so he took them out and examined the canopy. It was about to hit peak fall migration season, so there was potential to see something cool. He didn’t see anything but geese.
Ilya returned, smoking a cigarette. He registered Shane’s binoculars. “Keeping watch for criminal activity?”
“Staying vigilant," Shane played along. “Glad you made it out alive.”
Ilya looked pleasantly surprised, which was insulting. Shane could be funny when he wanted to be.
“Smoking’s bad for you.” No matter how good it looked.
“Is it?”
Ilya took one last inhale and put out the cigarette. Shane had a lecture loaded. He didn’t care if it was rude or annoying or whatever. Those filters were toxic waste, contributing to the problem of plastics in the ocean and everywhere else, and if he watched Ilya toss his on the ground after polluting his own body with it, he was going to— Oh. Ilya flicked the fire out and added it to a baggie of spent filters in his pocket.
This was the whole problem with this guy, Shane was learning. You couldn’t just dislike him. He had to go and have redeeming qualities.
The volunteer coordinator at the Aquarium Métropolitain was a guy named Miles. He was always asking Shane questions. Well, he was always asking everyone he worked with questions, but mostly he worked with volunteers, and that was just polite, to show interest in people who were giving their time to help care for the aquarium and the species within it. But he asked Shane a lot of questions.
“Why do you always ask so many questions,” Shane had asked Miles a week ago, after Shane had spent an exhausting hour supervising a volunteer giving Harold the green sea turtle’s shell a nice brushing. Harold was really into that kind of thing, and Miles was always looking for special experiences to offer volunteers who had been especially generous with their time.
Miles batted his eyes, which Shane realized were actually really… pretty. That was the only word for it. And then he’d said, “It’s a game.”
“What game?” Shane had asked, distracted by how long and full Miles’s eyelashes were.
“The questions. Everyone has one thing they love to talk about. I like to figure out what that is.”
“Oh.” Shane had dropped a head of lettuce to Harold as a reward for coming to the target for brushing. He had watched him chase down the leaves while he'd thought about it. And then he’d been called away and forgotten all about it.
Until he decided that, even though Ilya Rozanov seemed like kind of an asshole, he still wanted Ilya to want to talk to him.
He’d asked about Russia. Nothing. He’d asked about his family. Nothing. He’d asked about where he went to college. Algonquin, he’d said, and then nothing. He’d asked about his wife, even though he’d really hoped she wasn’t the thing Ilya loved to talk about.
Unfortunately, Ilya did like to talk about Svetlana, which was his wife’s name, and about how they met in college and how she moved to Ottawa when she was two because her father played professional hockey, and how she was really good in bed. Shane really didn’t need to know that part. Shane had been with girls, but he hadn’t been with anyone that he would classify as ‘really good in bed,’ and he was starting to suspect that might mean Shane wasn’t that good in bed. Shane thought that living with your best friend who you clearly adored and who was also really good in bed seemed like a pretty normal marriage to him, but he decided he would rather listen to days upon days of Russian techno than learn any more about Svetlana.
Shane tried to decide what the one thing was that he liked to talk about. He mostly worked with corals. They were interesting, and keeping the right balance of coral species, open water, and variety of textures in the reef tanks with synthetic sunlight and fluctuating water parameters required a lot of skill, which he liked. But he’d learned most people didn’t find corals quite as interesting as he did.
Maybe it was birds. They had a lot of birds at the aquarium: atlantic puffins, five different types of penguins, albatross, parrots, owls, a few hawks, even a white-tailed eagle. He didn’t work much in the seabird habitats, mostly because they were loud and slimy, even with frequent cleaning, and they usually got cleaned while the aquarium was open to the public, which meant he was kind of on display along with the birds. But he liked to watch them swim and squawk at each other. And he liked helping Rose, who was in charge of seabirds, make videos of the penguins for YouTube. He was pretty good with the camera.
“What kind of animals do you work with?” he asked.
“Apes. Orangutans, gorillas, bonobos. Lemurs. Lemur is not ape, but in same building, so.” Ilya shrugged.
And then, like magic, he kept talking. He told Shane what he liked about primates, how smart they were, how much trouble they were. About the new enrichment puzzle he was designing for the bonobos, about the baby gorilla that had been born recently. It took them all the way to lunch.
Ilya insisted they take an actual lunch break—they were making good time, he said, even though he had barely glanced at the MapQuest printout Shane had given him—and so they sat down with burgers and fries.
“I am worried about my old lady, Clementine,” Ilya confessed.
“Your… grandma?”
Ilya looked aghast, and then laughed. “No, Hollander.” Shane was pretty sure the ‘Hollander’ was supposed to be derogatory in some way, but it made him smile in spite of himself. “Clementine is senior orangutan.”
“Oh,” Shane said, laughing a little at himself. “Wait, is she sick?”
“No, only old.” Ilya said, wiping his mouth with a napkin as he finished chewing. “One month ago she moves to a different zoo. But she does not enjoy enrichment games there. She eats less. She does not go to the keeper like she knows how.” He looked genuinely troubled. “It worries me, yes?”
“Sure,” Shane agreed, even though he couldn’t quite imagine that. Obviously he knew animals were capable of forming bonds with their keepers, even if that wasn’t something corals typically did. But the idea of any animal exhibiting unusual behavior just because they missed Ilya Rozanov seemed… far-fetched.
He finished the last of his food and flattened the cardboard food containers before bagging them with the flatware and straws at the center to reduce the likelihood the plastic would escape the landfill and disintegrate into wildlife-threatening microplastics. Ilya watched this with fascination, a crooked smile transforming his face, and Shane tried to continue his deliberate processing of their garbage like this was normal, while realizing that to Ilya it was a sign he was deeply odd.
“My specialty is corals,” Shane said, before Ilya could say anything rude about what he’d just witnessed.
“Oh?”
“Yeah.”
And this was how Shane spent the rest of the drive getting his sweet revenge by telling him every single thing he had ever learned about corals.
To Shane’s great distress, Ilya did not seem bothered by this at all.
After a few missed turns owing to Ilya’s insistence on navigating by (flawed) intuition and his refusal to follow the printed directions, they arrived at the convention center in downtown Buffalo. Shane watched as Ilya took his suitcase out of the back and then lifted Shane’s out as well. His biceps bunched under his shirt, and Shane wondered if those were normal zookeeper muscles, from like… lifting hay bales and gorilla… stuff. Or if maybe he worked out, too. His shirt rode up as he reached to close the tailgate, and Shane thought those were probably not normal zookeeper abs, not that zookeepers couldn’t have nice abs, or glutes, which he couldn’t help but notice were also pretty, uh… strong. Probably there was a gym involved. Or like, pilates or something. Pilates was known for strengthening the core, right? And then he realized Ilya was watching his face and grinning, and that meant he probably knew where Shane’s face had been looking.
“Shut up,” Shane said, pretending he needed to look at the Jeep’s keyfob to find the lock button.
“I say nothing.”
“You were going to.” Shane braced for whatever it was and tried to will the heat out of his cheeks.
Ilya’s smile widened, and then he did something even worse than talking. He checked Shane out. Like visibly, obviously, checked Shane out. Not like a quick glance, either. He did a full body scan, slow, methodical, if it was possible for a look to be methodical. Shane was pinned in place, unable to do anything but turn redder.
It wasn’t like Shane didn’t know guys could check out other guys. Obviously guys could check out other guys. Miles had checked him out once, he was pretty sure. Which was a compliment, he was pretty sure. And he’d done that whole club night with Rose. And there were animals who formed same-sex pair bonds. Famously so. Rose had shown him a children’s book about male penguins who raised a chick together based on a real story. Shane tried hard not to think of them as gay penguins. He didn’t like it when people ascribed human social structures to other animals, if for no other reason than it gave an opening to bigoted so-called family values groups to launch big I-told-you-so’s when one of the penguins inevitably did a very normal penguin thing and ditched last mating season’s partner for a fluffy female named Scrappy. But the point was, humans were among many species who were, from time to time, attracted to same-sex partners. This was biology. Which was science.
Ilya tilted his head, as if he was wondering why Shane was thinking about penguins when Ilya was thinking about sex, and Shane decided that was quite enough scrutiny.
“You’re flying somewhere else after this, right?”
Ilya nodded. “Russia.”
Shane sort of wanted to ask what for, but it was different talking to him face to face like this. Kind of… intense. “Are you going to Registration?”
“No. I think I will check into hotel first.”
Shane nodded. That was good. They wouldn’t have to stand awkwardly in line together and pretend they were anything more than people who exchanged a ride for help with gas money. He stuck out his hand to take his leave.
“Nice meeting you,” he said.
Ilya grinned wider and took his hand in his big, warm, calloused grip. “Thank you for driving.”
“Hope you have fun at the conference.”
He nodded. “Yes. Same for you.”
Shane wasn’t sure to say after that, but Ilya raised an eyebrow, which was weird, until Shane realized he was still holding his hand.
He dropped it immediately.
He took the handle of his roller suitcase in one hand and issued a ridiculous wave with the other. “Okay then. Nice meeting you.”
There was another of those sharp grins. Predatory. Omniverous. Like a bear. “Okay,” Ilya said.
Shane turned and picked a direction. He would walk with purpose until he was out of Ilya’s sight, and then he would figure out where registration was, get his badge, and make his way to the hotel. Then he would settle in, order room service with his per diem funds, and enjoy a quiet night in before he would go to bed early to make sure he was well-rested for the workshops and speakers the next day.
And he would never have to give Ilya Rozanov so much as a second thought.
It was a good plan. Unfortunately, it was ruined almost immediately.