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After a week of perfect weather in Shane’s cottage, the sky cracks open and the lake turns a dark, eerie gray, littered with white caps that always make him worried for the loons. The pitter patter of rain creates a symphony on the copper roof — Shane’s favorite side effect of the durable, weather-ready material — and Ilya whines like a dog missing his afternoon walk.
“I want to go innnn,” he groans, still wearing his swim trunks from the morning.
Shane pulls up his weather app, the one he pays $20 a month for just to get hyper-local updates for the cottage. He sighs. “It’s like this for the next twelve hours.”
Ilya groans more. “So, what, 2am? We will skinny dip?”
Shane actually considers it for a split second before his logic kicks in. “Absolutely not.”
Ilya gives up too easily, which Shane knows to mean he will come back to this later. “Fine,” Ilya says, taking the towel off of his shoulders and turning to face Shane. “But if I cannot be inside lake, can I please be inside you?”
“There’s an idea,” Shane shrugs, then smiles deviously: “Not one that’s likely to happen, but an idea.”
Ilya accepts the challenge and moves toward Shane, taking his whole chin in his hand and kissing him roughly. Shane’s body responds immediately, his hands moving against Ilya’s bare arms to pull him closer.
Ilya’s fingers find the bottom of Shane’s shirt and lift it over his head, their mouths only pulling apart for a moment in the familiar dance. He guides Shane to the couch, away from where raindrops paint streaks on the floor-to-ceiling windows, threatening the strange joy of fucking in a visible place.
Before he knows it, Shane is underneath his boyfriend, cock swelling in his shorts. Ilya pulls those off, too, and moves his mouth down Shane’s chest. He makes a line of kisses, small hickeys, and gentle bites, creating goosebumps beneath his lips wherever he goes. Meanwhile, he uses his thumb to rub a gentle circle around Shane’s nipple and pinches it gently, then harder, harder…
Shane whimpers. Ilya kisses and sucks the nipple, then repeats the process on the other side. He moves back up to kiss Shane intensely, tongue swiping into his mouth, before trailing back down and coming eye level with the proof of how turned on his boyfriend is.
“Is it okay? Can we…?” Ilya asks, mouth hovering over Shane’s dick.
“Yeah,” Shane breathes out as he nods, eager for Ilya’s mouth. His cock twitches upward, a magnet to the man’s touch.
“Need better permission,” Ilya says. “You know what I want. I need to know what you want.”
Shane huffs, rolling his eyes. “You,” he says. He reaches down and places both hands at the back of Ilya’s head, attempting to pull his mouth down onto him.
“Me what?” Ilya teases, squirming away from Shane’s pull. He presses a kiss to Shane’s lower stomach instead.
“God, Ilya, I want you to fuck me, okay?” Shane whines.
“More,” Ilya says, this time kissing just the tip of Shane’s cock.
“Fuck my brains out. C-,” Shane stammers and squirms in desperation. In a horny haze, he decides to stay true to his promise from earlier in the week and say exactly what’s on his mind, how he really feels. “-Come inside me, fill me up, make me yours.…Rearrange my fucking organs,” he trails off, lost in it.
“Holy shit,” Ilya says, repeating the phrase he definitely picked up from Shane. “Someone has been reading porn.”
Shane is too gone to care, or to say that yes, of course he had to do something in the months and sometimes years that went by between their hookups. As a reward, Ilya takes his entire cock into his mouth, sucking and licking the length with a hunger that would suggest they hadn’t done this a mere hour ago. Shane moans and bucks his hips up, pushing deeper into his boyfriend’s mouth.
Ilya runs a finger along Shane’s hole, where there’s a slight opening already from a week’s worth of ruining it. Shane grabs the lube — they conveniently placed containers near every sex-ready space in the house — and pours it onto Ilya’s outstretched hand. The first finger is seamless, like slipping into a glove, and Shane wonders when it switched to feeling empty without Ilya’s fingers, instead of achingly full with them.
Ilya continues bobbing his mouth on Shane’s cock as he gets in a second, then third, finger and crooks them to a fleshy point he’s mapped out. Shane loses it, sputtering down Ilya’s throat. Ilya groans with joy around Shane’s cock, and the vibrations and tightness of his lips only milks out more of it. He’s somewhere in a whited out space when Ilya flips him over onto all fours and slips inside of him.
Shane comes back to earth after who knows how many thrusts as Ilya unravels above him, his rhythm shaky from how much Shane’s sex talk had turned him on. With the realization of how much Ilya was absolutely wrecked by what he said, Shane continues his ramble.
“Fuck me harder,” he moans, moving his hips to create a faster movement. “Mark me with your cum.”
Ilya reacts with sounds Shane hasn’t heard before, desperate and Russian but clearly dripping with arousal.
“Want you so deep in me,” Shane continues. “Want all of you. So empty without you.” He moves Ilya’s hand from his hip to his lower abdomen. “Feel your cock filling me,” he says, showing Ilya the small bulge that arises when all 9 inches of him are buried there.
“Blyat,” Ilya cries and thrusts harder, his face red and his brow furrowed. Oh, this is fun, Shane thinks.
“Come in me,” he begs again. “Please, Ilya. Need to be leaking you. I’m so fucking yours, I love you so fucking much. Come for me like you love me.”
“Bozhe moy,” Ilya yells as he thrusts in one final time, his cock twitching as warmth fills Shane’s hole. The feeling, combined with the friction from his cock against the couch, made more intense with every thrust, sends Shane over the edge again. He quickly puts his hand over his dick to try to capture the come and protect the couch beneath them. Ilya is too out of it to notice this and mock Shane for caring about cleanliness despite his asshole being gaped open, dripping come.
Ilya collapses onto the couch, panting and staring blankly. Shane pulls a blanket underneath himself to have something to drip onto and lays next to Ilya.
“Holy fuck, Hollander,” Ilya gasps, still gathering himself. His whole body is covered in a layer of sweat that Shane wants to lick off. Instead, Shane leans in and kisses him, moving his arm under Ilya’s shoulders to pull him in for a cuddle. Ilya all but purrs at the motion and settles into the crook of Shane’s neck, kissing it gently as he does. “Where did you learn that?” he says into Shane’s skin.
Shane smiles smugly. “The internet.”
“Da, I know the internet, I mean where on the internet?”
“If I told you, I wouldn’t be able to surprise you when I pull out new things like this. And clearly you like being surprised,” Shane responds.
“Fine,” Ilya huffs. But then he considers more of the conversation. “And there is a website that taught you to beg me to come in you like I love you?” He follows up.
“That one was off the cuff,” Shane says proudly. “It just felt right.”
“I love you,” Ilya says, “ya tak sil'no tebya lyublyu.”
Shane hums with happiness at the Russian translation he’s already memorized. “I love you so much, Ilya.” He feels overcome by it, a wave of butterflies swarming through his chest. “It’s like I’ve always loved you.”
Ilya shakes his head, and Shane feels the movement against his shoulder. “You hated me those first few years. You wanted to fuck me, yes, but still hated me.”
Shane considers this. He runs his fingers through Ilya’s sweaty hair and breathes in the scent of them combined with the thick humidity from the rain outside. “I don’t think I ever hated you,” he says. “But no, I guess I didn’t love you, not at first.”
Ilya moves so his head is next to Shane’s, their eyes meeting. “When did it become love? For you?” he asks so simply, a tender plea.
Shane racks his mind for the answer.
It seems obvious and impossible all at the same time. He’s thought about the man in front of him and his galaxy of moles and his shoulder muscles and his thick Russian accent every day now for the better part of a decade. Even on the days when they didn’t speak — which, if they were to take an inventory, were the sad majority — Shane always wondered what Ilya was doing, who he was flirting with, how he felt about any random assortment of topics.
He had mapped Ilya’s whereabouts across the country, sometimes without even realizing. If someone had asked Shane at any moment over the past 7 years, “what city is Ilya in right now?” he could answer in the blink of an eye. He wouldn’t answer. But he could.
Through his and Ilya’s tireless circumnavigation of each other, Shane had become so familiar with the geography between them that he could take up cartography if he ever needed a side hustle. He’d learned how many miles Montreal was from Boston, from Los Angeles, from Moscow. And as they kept moving, it was no longer town to town, but how many miles their invisible, electric connection was spread taut over at any given moment. He no longer had to think hard about Ilya’s location or look at game schedules to know if the man was achingly, painfully far away, or close enough that the tightness in Shane’s throat could subside. He just felt it.
Shane regularly has had full conversations with Ilya in his head, too. That habit had probably started around the same time as the mapping — the summer before rookie year — and grown from a minor murmur in the back of his head into loud, all-consuming thoughts that made the nonstop plane, train, and bus rides go by easier.
It was Shane’s favorite way to fly, and he can’t remember a time when he didn’t spend his hours above the clouds in an imaginary conversation with Ilya. He’d throw on noise cancelling headphones and a classical music playlist (so that no lyrics got in the way of the scene in his head), and pretend to nap while his mind ran rampant. He could even do a perfect Russian accent in his brain for Ilya, though he’s sure it would never translate out loud. In those secret moments, Shane told Ilya about his lonely childhood, his hatred of press conferences, how he felt about his teammates, and everything he craved but would never let himself indulge in. In return, Ilya would deliver sarcastic quips or belittling but flirtatious remarks. As time went on, Ilya’s responses began to include softness, too. An empathetic brush of his thumbs over Shane’s cheek or a pouty but genuine “Hollander.”
Yes, Ilya had been a main character inside of Shane’s head for all of Shane’s adult life now. But when had it turned from obsession to love?
Shane knew it was a crush from day one — hot and lustful and so urgent he could have died the night Ilya got snowed in and couldn’t fuck him. He knew his skin burned under Ilya’s touch, giving the man a power over him that no one else had ever achieved. But that wasn’t love. Loving Ilya the way he did now gave their hot lust a layer of tenderness: velvet fabric wrapped around a lit fire that kept the flame from burning the way it used to.
When has his heart changed from a hot red coal to a this sweet fluttering thing every time Ilya touched him?
After the All-Star Game, when Ilya had pinned him onto the bed and asked to fuck him, he had asked if Shane was scared. It was the first time Shane felt Ilya's deep sense of care, and he remembered feeling a tiny shift in the way his heart beat for the man. But that night was still so sexual, not loving.
And then there was Montreal, the first time Ilya was inside of him. It had been so, so long since they’d been together, so maybe it was the months of endless yearning talking, but something had definitely shifted then. Shane had never felt so close to anyone before. He quite literally hadn’t been.
All of their previous interactions, before Montreal, had left a giant void inside of Shane’s chest. They said their goodnights and the second they were apart, the reality of the time between each meetup would hit him and carve an uncomfortable darkness inside of him.
But this time, Ilya left and Shane still felt warm. His home wasn’t a lonely, lifeless thing anymore: it was a warm place where Ilya had been, the scents of cigarette and his earthy hair gel still lingering. His bed was a place Ilya had been, too, and Shane got to remember the weight of the man’s body next to his every time he fell asleep at home.
This was not love, either, though. At least not to Shane.
The real moment happened when his iron chest alchemized to mercury under Ilya’s gaze, and Rozanov became his Ilya. Instead of two hot, muscular bodies they were these timeless souls staring staring deeply into each other. It was the moment Shane looked at Ilya and saw every past and future iteration of him all at once: the little boy with curly blond hair on a slanted and melting rink in Russia, the mischievous rookie who messed with the press, the middle aged hockey coach who accidentally taught their kids Russian curse words.
And that moment happened to be completely inconsequential.
Shane can’t help but laugh when it hits him.
“What? Shane, tell meeee,” Ilya pleads, tired of waiting patiently for his answer. His head is on the pillow next to Shane’s and his eyes are scanning Shane’s face, trying to read the answer inside of his skull. Shane thinks maybe he could.
“The Olympics,” he finally replies with another laugh.
Ilya pushes up from the couch, mouth open wider than the O shape he makes when he’s about to bury his come in Shane. “The OLYMPICS? In Russia?”
Shane nods, still smiling at the revelation, just as surprised.
“You had just lost to Latvia,” Shane explains. He looks into Ilya’s eyes, filling with love from just the memory. “I watched the game from this random ice cream shop in the Olympic village, and I saw the look on your face when the timer ran out. It was the worst feeling I’ve ever experienced.”
“Oh, and this is love, to you?” Ilya mocks.
“Shhh,” Shane puts a finger over Ilya’s lips jokingly. “Let me finish.”
“You did, twice,” Ilya jokes.
Shane goes quiet, considering keeping this to himself for longer. Maybe it’s too cheesy for this moment after all. Maybe this is more of a “we’ve been dating for a year or five” conversation, not for right now. He looks up at Ilya to read his face, and sees only curiosity and love reflected back at him.
“Do you want to know or—“
“Da, I do. Desperately. I will stop with the jokes,” Ilya replies.
Shane takes a breath, getting back into the memory. “When I saw your face on the screen, I realized I would have done anything to make it better for you. I would have switched places with you. I would have given up the Olympics if it meant saving you from your misery. I knew that you must have been under so much pressure, with your family there and Russia and all of the memories that country holds for you. And I would have given anything in the world to make it better.”
Ilya moves his fingers across Shane’s cheek. He coughs a little to try to get rid of the lump in his throat.
“That’s what made me realize that you were more important to me than hockey,” Shane said. “And that meant that you were the most important thing in the world to me. Are the most important.” He looks at Ilya, concerned that this is too much, because who the fuck would admit that? If his mother overheard him talking like this, she’d have a heart attack on the spot. “Maybe that’s stupid,” he backtracks, looking upward to break the eye contact. “I’m sure there’s some other moment when I-“
“No, no, it makes sense,” Ilya concludes.
“Fuck off,” Shane says, assuming he’s joking.
“I’m serious!” He kisses Shane’s cheek then turns to the side so they’re both looking up at the ceiling as Ilya uses his hands to demonstrate the point. “It’s like this. Shane Hollander, Mr. Logical Brain, says hockey equals true love,” he spells it out with his hands like an equation. “And then Ilya beats hockey,” he shoves the imaginary word out of the air, “so now Ilya equals true love. Yes?”
Shane beams, his body filling with the thrill of being seen so perfectly. “Exactly.”
Giddy, Ilya rolls back on top of him and kisses him, smile against smile until they melt into each other, moving their tongues fluidly again. “Now I have to make love to you. It is rule,” he moves his head down and sucks a small spot on the crook of Shane’s neck.
“I just came, like, five minutes ago,” Shane protests, not moving away from the welcomed contact.
“Has never stopped you before,” Ilya looks him in the eye again, raising an eyebrow mischievously.
“And I want to know your answer. When it became real for you,”
“I guess it has always been real,” Ilya shrugs. “Since summer before Rookie year.”
Shane pushes him off now. “No, come on, I don’t accept that. I want a real answer, not just when you knew you wanted to fuck me.”
Ilya thinks about this for a second, as though it had never crossed his mind. Shane thinks maybe it hasn’t. “… And then I can make love to you?”
“You can do whatever you want with me then. But we should take a bath before, too.”
Ilya smiles. “Careful what you promise.” He stands up and grabs his towel from the railing beside him, offering it to Shane. “For your dripping come hole,” he says bluntly. “So we don’t leave trail on floor.”
“Fuck off,” Shane rolls his eyes.
“What, two can’t play that game? You are only one who can dirty talk?”
Shane doesn’t answer this, for fear Ilya will retaliate by actually stopping the dirty talk. He wraps the towel around himself and stands up, following Ilya into the bathroom.
Ilya pours a layer of eucalyptus Epsom salts into the giant clawfoot tub, and Shane feels warm at the sight of his boyfriend moving fluidly through the space like he’s been here forever.
—
Ilya watches the foamy bath rise as his memory scans through all of the early encounters with Shane. That very first day, when Shane introduced himself like a little nerd, something in Ilya knew that Shane was his. He couldn’t explain it: it wasn’t love or an ownership kink thing, it was just a knowledge that Shane Hollander was meant to be next to him at all times, but that he would have to settle for a fraction of that, at least for now.
From that first moment onward, too much time apart was unnatural, a glitch in the system. And Ilya suffered in those glitches, aching for something that hadn’t even existed yet. Every moment he wasn’t with Shane occurred in error. It made him believe in alternate universes, and that they were stuck in the wrong one, in a place that wouldn’t let them be together even though that was his simplest, most fundamental need in the world.
To Shane, Ilya was a sexual awakening. Ilya knew this from the moment he saw Shane’s dick swell in the shower after their CCM photoshoot together. Every shocked look on Shane’s face and avoidant pullback was part of this journey of self discovery — one that Ilya had had the luxury of doing in his early teenage years, without the press breathing down his neck.
So Ilya allowed things to stay sexual for a very long time. It wasn't the worst thing in the world.
But to Ilya, Shane was a spiritual awakening.
The God his mother had talked to him about when he was younger became real every time Shane kissed him, really kissed him. It wasn’t a Christian God, though, Ilya had decided. It was something more ancient than that, something deep in his bones that told him this love was eternal and therefore he was, too.
“I can see your brain working,” Shane interrupts. He turns off the tap, preventing the bath from overflowing, and climbed into the tub. Ilya watched his boyfriend’s sweaty, tired, holy body sink into the bubbles.
“I gave you time to think!” Ilya says, defensive but light. “It was so so long with you staring into distance. I could smell your brain overheating.”
Shane splashes the bubbles out of the tub at him.
“Wow, Mr. Filthy Mouth is making everything dirty now, even floor,” Ilya teases. He steps into the bath, too, moving so his knees are outside of Shane’s, but still touching. Of all of the positions they’ve been in, this is Ilya’s very favorite. Being naked and not sexual makes for a much deeper type of intimacy, he's realized.
“Is hard to explain,” Ilya says, holding a hand out in a shrug.
“Try?” Shane pleads.
Ilya nods. He turns on the translation mode in his brain, hoping that years of studying English will help him. He breathes. “To me, you are not just Shane Hollander," he starts. "And you have not been for a very, very long time. Everyone else on the planet is their own thing. Hayden Pike is Hayden Pike. Beyonce is Beyonce-“
“- I love that those are the examples that come to mind.”
Ilya smiles. “Da. Our two best friends. But what I mean is that these people are… contained? Is that right word? They are just here, in bodies. But you… you are everywhere, Shane. You’re the center of things. Gravitatsiya. Gravity. You are not this small human body, in this one little life. I see a million lives with you, before this and after this. Really. And even if you didn’t look like you, I would know it was you.
“Like if you died and became bird, I would pass that bird and say ‘oh, there he is, my baby.’ If your soul was in a tree, my soul would know that too. I would recognize the Shane tree. The same way I know when sunlight is sent from my mom. You and her are the only people I have ever seen do this.”
Ilya stops, wondering how the water got onto his chin, then realizes it’s his own teardrop. He cups some of the bath water into his hands and washes off his face. Shane is sitting there, mouth open, eyes looking at him lovingly so he knows it’s okay to continue.
“If, after we die, we all become blobs, you are the two blobs I will recognize.”
Shane laughs lightly at this, and Ilya watches a small tear fall down Shane’s freckles and into the tub.
“So,” Ilya continues. “When I think about when I knew I loved you, it’s also the moment I realized all of this. And I think that was when I got my first real kiss from you.”
“The night of that photo shoot, right? In LA?” Shane can't help but smile, clearly excited that it would be so early.
“No, no, don’t get your panties tied up, Hollander. After that,” he waves his hands to illustrate the point.
“But we kissed that night,” Shane says.
“Yes, but those were sex kisses. They were foreplay for fucking you. We both wanted something out of it. And plus, I kissed you, not the other way around.”
“Who cares?” Shane protests.
“I do,” Ilya says, genuine. “Because in those days, it was just fucking, right? Obviously it was something more than that, too, but there was nothing from you to prove that. And I wasn't admitting it, even just to me," he holds back some of the sadness underneath those words. "But no. The first time you gave me real kiss was at your apartment.”
“Wasn't that the first time we…”
“Had sex, yes. Was not part of that, though. It was after. Do you remember this? I laid down next to you after I showered. You talked about how fucking hot our sex was. Which, of course, making you come like that, being with you like that. Of course. And I asked if it was worth the wait. I thought, you know, we make some jokes and get on with the night. But then you looked at me, and pushed our noses together, and kissed me. Real kiss. And then, God, you kissed my forehead. And… boom. In love. Yours.”
Shane still has a massive grin on his face and tears in his eyes, but then he thinks for a moment. “Didn’t you leave right after that? Why didn’t you stay the night?”
“Oh well of course I was scared shitfaced,” Ilya says.
“Shitless,” Shane corrects.
“That whole talking and one wrong word,” Ilya rolls his eyes. “You are word police.”
“If I don’t correct you, you’ll say it wrong in front of other people and embarrass yourself,” Shane replies. “But that’s beside the point. You fell in love first.”
“This is surprising to you?” Ilya asks. Shane looks at him like he can’t believe he’s serious.
“I’ve been putty in the palm of your hand this whole time,” Shane says. “I always thought I wanted this more.”
“Ah, no,” Ilya shakes his head. “I am putty. You are hand.”
Ilya lies back, letting his head fall to the back of the tub. He sits there in bliss, wishing to soak in the moment. Shane lays a hand on his knee and plants a kiss on the other one.
In the silence, Ilya notices a very important detail he had missed. The sound of the raindrops has died down, leaving them without that natural background music for the first time in hours. He gets out of the tub, kisses Shane on the forehead as he leaves, and runs into the hallway to look out the windows. The sun must have just set, because there’s still a trace of orange light behind each cloud in the sky. The lake is still and sandy pink, no raindrops across the surface.
“No more rain!” Ilya yells across the house. “Swim time!”
He doesn’t have to hear Shane groan to know it’s happening. Ilya grabs two beach towels from the drawer in the laundry room and runs into the bathroom with them.
“Skinny dipping, you promised,” Ilya says through his smile.
“I absolutely did not promise that, liar.” Shane gets out of the bubbles and puts on the towel from Ilya’s hands. He starts walking toward the back door next to his boyfriend.
“Pleaaaase, Shane,” Ilya begs. “I just bore my heart for you. I deserve treat.”
Shane opens the door and walks across the back yard, surveying the level of darkness. The automatic lights on the pathway turn on, but everything else is hard to make out now that the sunlight is completely gone.
“I think I like it when you beg for me,” Shane says. It makes Ilya’s heart jump, first because he loves finding a new kink, but also because Shane’s tone seems less reluctant.
Ilya gets down on his knees and put his hands together in a prayer pose. “I will do anything,” he pleads.
“I like you on your knees, too,” Shane smiles. He keeps leading Ilya down the path until they reach the rock that serves as a makeshift dock. The loons’ ghostly calls fill the air, and they are finally soothing to Ilya instead of terrifying. “Fine,” Shane says. “But you go in first.”
“Deal!” Ilya beams back. He throws his towel to the side and jumps into the lake.
Shane follows, lowering himself in instead of jumping all at once. Ilya receives him into his arms and holds him the way he does when he carries him into bed. Shane rests his head on Ilya’s shoulder and kisses his neck.
“Next life, we come back as loons,” Ilya says. Shane nods into him.