Chapter Text
Ilya wakes up before the alarm, which is unfortunate. But not as unfortunate as waking up hard, his cock heavy and uncomfortable in his pajama pants. Or that he can't do anything about it, because Shane Hollander is in the room with him, asleep in the other twin bed, the space between them an errant arm’s swipe away.
Theoretically, Ilya can just slip into the bathroom to take care of it, but that brings about a different kind of predicament. If Ilya leaves to jerk off over the sink, he won’t get to keep looking at Shane’s face, annoyingly pretty in the morning light, the sun caught on his skin, lodged in his lashes.
It's just curiosity, Ilya tells himself—a study of something he would not otherwise be privy to, a secret he accidentally stumbled upon in the margins of Shane's exterior. Everyone looks softer in sleep, but Shane is different. Like this—his eyelids moving with unknown dreams, his pillowy lips parted around shallow breaths—he looks less like a machine wired with anxiety and ambition, and more like…just a boy. Like any other boy from Ilya's school who joins him when he cuts the last period, to loiter under the creaking bleachers on the far side of the stadium, talking shit and smoking cigarettes and maybe half-heartedly bouncing a hacky sack between them.
Eventually, Shane will wake up, and he will remember how to look fierce, his glare dialed up to its limits just for Ilya's sake. The illusion will crumple, and the world will right itself.
Idly, Ilya wonders why it hasn't happened yet, how Shane has managed to stay asleep with that much light flooding the room. It's too bright and too quiet—every time Ilya shifts, the starchy sheets hiss like a storm of sand kicking up—as though the two of them have been entombed, buried six feet under. It makes Ilya think it snowed overnight.
He turns onto his side to look out the window, though he knows it's fruitless. He can't make out the view through the grey hotel curtains, thin and transparent like pinned moth wings, everything beyond a uniform stretch of fuzzy winter-white.
But Ilya's confident it snowed. He breathed it last night during their exhausting walk from the arena to the lodging, the air so sharp it hurt, settling in his lungs like a scatter of pine needles.
Just thinking about it makes him feel clammy with a shiver, as he drags the blanket up to the tip of his nose. It's inconceivable that he'll have to get up at some point—and not a very far-off point at that. The bedside clock reads 7:42; Ilya has only eighteen minutes before the alarm goes off.
Ilya shifts again, rolling onto his stomach to mirror Shane's position, the way the other man has the pillow cradled under his chest, his cheek plastered against it. Ilya doesn't make an attempt to be quiet, almost daring the rustling sheets beneath him—loud in the quiet room like receding thunder—to stir Shane awake.
It's a harmless gamble, though Ilya doesn't know exactly what he's won when Shane remains asleep, his breathing as even and steady as the march of an old clock. Other than, of course, another stolen moment to observe, to take in the state of him: his lips spilled apart, jaw slightly displaced, a puddle of drool gathering in the corner of his mouth.
It should be unattractive, and yet Ilya can't look away—can't seem to stop tempting fate. Maybe because it's the last time he'll be afforded the chance to.
They'll see each other again, but never like this: exiled to a remote part of Canada, the province name a lot more fun to pronounce than it is to travel to, stowed away in its cold desolateness for the duration of the school winter break to attend a "prestigious hockey camp for exceptionally talented players," which just means it accepts anyone who can afford its ridiculously overpriced fee and is run by washed-up coaches, professionals who never made anything of themselves.
There is scant talent in the program pool, just spoiled brats who can barely keep up with either Shane or Ilya, and sometimes Ilya feels like it's just the two of them on the ice, and briefly in the entire world.
They've been going every year, with the exception of the one when Ilya turned twelve and his mother passed away. He supposes it was generous of his father to let him skip it once and spend the break instead in his room, hiding from his brother's drinking binges that had a tendency to turn violent.
“I'm sorry about your mom,” Shane remembered to tell him when they met at camp the following year, having heard about it somehow. He sounded diplomatic, very convincingly playing dress-up as an adult capable of laying aside their animosity to address something so serious.
Ilya's mouth curled with a sneer. He preferred the animosity, thrived on it. From the very first camp, when they were still little and occasionally wobbly on sharp pivots, the rink boards towering around them as high as the walls of some fortress, they used each other to learn to chirp. But Ilya quickly grew addicted to it and never stopped. It was fun to provoke Shane, satisfying to see a ruthlessly wild glint come alive in his eyes every time Ilya managed to land a jab, physical or verbal—to know it was him, that he could have that effect.
They were each other's marker, and Ilya looked forward every year to winter break, to the waste of time that was camp, just to see if he'd gained an inch of height over Shane, if he was finally faster than him, if his endurance was still superior. Ilya knew Shane felt the same, dogging him around the facilities on their time off the ice—sometimes to the gym to try to lift more than Ilya, sometimes to the indoor swimming pool to race laps with him, turning even holding their breath into a competition.
Ilya was surprised they'd never actually taken their dicks out and measured them, though Ilya maybe once had hinted at the topic after getting slammed into the boards by Shane and told to “Wake up, Rozanov.”
It was the year before their last, and Shane, right on the cusp of turning seventeen, had successfully caught up to Ilya in height, becoming nearly brutish in his frame—though maybe more so in the legs, versus Ilya's upper body. The revelation of how easily Shane could intercept him and throw him around the rink was sinking in, stark and suffocating like a fist pressed to his windpipe.
“Suck my dick, Hollander,” Ilya hissed back, loath to admit that he did feel kind of sluggish that day; even the retort was missing its teeth.
Shane appeared appropriately unimpressed. He skated backwards, laconically keeping pace with Ilya just so he could roll his eyes and quip, “Tried to. But I couldn't find it.”
“Ah no,” Ilya said, his nerves suddenly on fire, a crooked smile settling into its rightful place on his mouth. “You did not try hard enough. Come here,” he taunted, his palm curving around the cup in front of his cock.
Then Shane just muttered, “Fuck off,” and turned his back as he skated away, and it should have felt like victory, except that Ilya had to bite the inside of his cheek until he tasted blood so his dick wouldn't harden all the way.
The fresh air had gotten to his head. He was going insane from being cut off from the civilized world. The line between adrenaline and arousal was thin, and he had merely confused the two in the moment. Regardless of the excuses Ilya had conjured up, none of it was enough to keep the incident singular, or to prevent his imagination from unraveling into scenarios that inconveniently featured another man.
Not that him being another man had ever mattered to Ilya the way it seemed to matter to the rest of the world, but it should have when it came to Shane fucking Hollander, the bane of his existence. Their animosity was—is—real as anything, not just banter their coaches were happy to let slide in the name of competition, or maybe even something greater, more promotional, like a life-long rivalry.
The thing is—and this is something that took Ilya a while to grasp, but had finally occurred to him one late fall day as he walked home from classes, leaves pulverizing beneath the treads of his boots, cigarette smoke replacing the breath pouring from his mouth—he was waiting for the drab winter to arrive, and the chance of seeing Shane at camp again, everything else contracting into lesser importance, defragmenting like a dream.
The thing is, they couldn't be each other's equals without the possibility that one of them would surpass the other, and they both knew the day was coming and already preemptively hated each other for it. Everything else paled in comparison.
“Thanks,” Ilya had told Shane after he offered condolences about his mother. “I wish it was my dad instead,” he added, with the dramatic candor of a teenager who would never learn to process grief as anything but anger.
Shane's eyes widened at that, already impressively big on his face. He took a step back, recoiling from Ilya like he actually expected him to resurrect Irina by killing Grigoriy with his bare hands right in front of him.
He steered clear of Ilya in the coming days, but somewhere along the way he began to forget that Ilya was a monster, or maybe decided it was more fun to antagonize one than to fear it.
They'd not been assigned to room together in all the years they went to camp. There were plenty of letters between H and R, and somehow all of the people between them had dropped out, or vanished into nonexistence, this last year—the one before Shane was destined to get drafted and Ilya was set to defer his own with a scholarship at BU.
Coincidentally, it was also the same year Shane had filled out into his frame, muscle carving indents into his skin, popping the veins running down his arms into thick lines. The same year he'd let his hair grow out a bit, a detour from the hideous buzz cut, strands falling across his forehead like a promise they could get even longer, perhaps even long enough to be tucked behind an ear one day. The same year the light deposited golden specks into the hue of his irises, and the sun brushed a smattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose.
In short, it was the worst year for them to room together, but it wasn't like Ilya had any say in the matter. He had trouble saying anything at all when he first arrived at camp and saw Shane walk into the lodge lobby, a mild swagger to his gait like his thighs were too big for the rest of him, weighing him down.
Ilya didn't say much during the welcome dinner either, to the point that Shane—who sat next to him for some unfathomable reason—teased him about it.
“What's wrong, Rozanov? Cat's got your tongue?” he asked, draping his arm around the back of Ilya's chair like they were friends or something.
They were not. But this was also the last year they were attending the stupid camp, so Ilya decided to let it slide.
Ilya had almost survived it, had almost made it to the end of the break unscathed, save for sleep deprivation, an accumulating ache in his overworked muscles, and a gathering sense of—well, Ilya didn't know what that tightness in his chest was called, if it had a name, or a word in some foreign language. A feeling like missing a place he'd never been to, or being forced to reckon with a goodbye before it even happened.
There was something different about Shane that year too, besides the physical changes—a cheeky sort of mellowness, an approachability, the rough edges polished out to match the perfection he was molding his body toward. Ilya was not the only one who noticed. The girls’ division attending camp that year did too, a gaggle of them parking in the stands to watch practice, then descending on them as soon as the session wrapped up.
“Okay,” Shane told them when they asked to practice with him, smiling almost imperceptibly as he glanced at Ilya. “But I’ll need my right wing.”
Ilya scoffed, annoyed because he wasn’t anyone’s right wing, and he was already tugging off his gloves, longing for the hot shower that awaited him, which he had apparently come very close to enjoying without Shane around.
But Shane was still looking at him, his eyes huge, imploring.
“Ask nicely, maybe,” Ilya drawled.
Shane’s smile, threadbare to begin with, vanished. He was silent and thoughtful for a moment, some devious machinations working themselves out behind his eyes before settling there with a wicked glint, the full force of the arena lights contained within it.
“Wait,” he said to Ilya, like Ilya was capable of moving or doing anything except standing there, wordless and pinned in place.
Shane briefly disappeared, only to return with a puck pinched in his gloved hand. Then he got in front of Ilya and sank down on one knee, holding the puck out toward him.
“What are you doing?” Ilya snapped incredulously, even though it was very obvious what Shane was doing. But Ilya had to give it a shot, to shame him into desisting.
Undeterred, Shane looked up at him, eyelashes fluttering mockingly fast, everything insolent about him when he asked, “Will you be my right wing, Ilya Rozanov?”
The girls, who had watched the entire spectacle unfold a few feet away, erupted into giggles, one of them shouting, “Say yes!”
Ilya ignored them, taking a step toward Shane, not pausing to consider how close that brought his crotch to Shane’s face, or how hot Shane looked flushed and on his knees. Clutching his gloves against his side with one hand, he lifted the other to the hinge of Shane’s jaw and began to trace, skin threaded with soft evening stubble and old acne scars, faint and faded.
His breath absolutely did not hitch when he spoke.
“Do it properly,” he murmured, voice pitching lower. “Say please.”
Shane did not call him out on the fact that a proper proposal did not typically include begging, suddenly looking like he regretted the entire joke, unable to meet Ilya’s gaze, the blush on his cheeks flaring violently like a gushing wound. Ilya resisted the urge to trace that too, to feel the heat seep into his own skin.
Eventually, Shane managed to bite out a please, the word so venomous with contempt that it made Ilya instantly pull away and regret the joke as well, filling him with paranoia that there would be some kind of retribution.
Ilya looked over his shoulder for the rest of camp, waiting for it. But the only retribution that found him was of his own making, the day before the end of break, when he woke before Shane and decided he could afford to study his soft-sleep face.
It stranded him in his own bed with morning wood so rigid it felt capable of cutting through the sheets, every shift of his body pressing it harder into the mattress until it became inevitable that he would remain there, peering across the too-small gap separating their beds, thinking about the shape of Shane’s mouth, pretty as a ruin.
Ilya is helpless, held in thrall by the possibilities. What would he give just to feel Shane’s mouth wrapped around his cock, those lush lips dragged across the tip. Fuck, he’d settle for tapping it there just once, quick and needy.
Or maybe just hovering there. He wouldn’t even let them touch, just hold himself over Shane’s face and watch his cock cast a shadow across it.
He contemplates it now—how deeply Shane is sleeping, how he probably wouldn’t even realize if Ilya paused at the foot of the bed on his way to the bathroom and pulled himself out. Ilya might get real close to his mouth without Shane ever knowing.
He isn’t going to do that. But the mere thought electrifies him, running hot and forbidden through his body. His cock, jammed between his stomach and the sheets, throbs with arousal, releasing a wet pulse of precome into his briefs. It’s embarrassing how even sinking harder into the mattress brings relief, punching a moan out of him that he has to smother by biting his pillow like it’s flesh.
It feels so good that he does it again, hips jerking with a faint thrust. The sound is obscenely audible, and if he keeps grinding against the sheets and Shane finally stirs awake, he’ll know exactly what Ilya is doing. Worse, he’ll know what Ilya was looking at—what he was getting off to.
The prospect is more thrilling than mortifying, which probably says something vaguely concerning about Ilya. Or maybe he’s just too far gone, because he can’t stop himself from doing it again, from humping the bed.
He hasn’t done anything like this in a long time, probably not since he was much younger, still exploring his body and all the different ways he could manipulate it into feeling good. It feels better than he remembers, his cock furrowing neatly into the mattress, the surface yielding around the length with a soft tease, the friction of his hips working the foreskin over the sensitive tip in light drags.
He knows he can come like this. He might even be closer than he thought possible, molten heat tugging low in his belly, like his orgasm had been building all night—a fire tended out of sight.
He can come, but he sort of doesn’t want to yet. He glances at the clock, realizing he still has a few minutes before the alarm goes off. It’s risky, every passing second an opening for Shane to wake up and discover him, but that only intensifies the pleasure, coursing honey-thick through his bloodstream, turning time itself into something sticky and malleable, almost within Ilya’s control. A folly. A dream trapped inside a snowglobe. The seductive notion that as long as Ilya holds out, the moment will stretch indefinitely, and he might somehow step outside of it long enough to experience two opposing states at once: satiety and want, fused into one infinite whole.
The spell breaks seconds later when Shane’s mouth twitches.
Ilya catches it because he’s still watching him intently, has not taken his eyes off him the entire time.
He stills immediately, no longer fucking the bed, and the room goes startlingly quiet, everything that belongs to Ilya suddenly too loud—his breath tumbling harsh and fast from his mouth, his pulse hammering in his ears. The edges of his vision blur, eyes watering from how tightly wound his body is, from how badly he needs to come, his throat dry and full of trapped moans.
Shane does not stir further. His eyes remain shut, but his breathing changes slightly, something almost imperceptibly off about the cadence of it. Which could mean nothing, but probably means he’s awake and pretending not to be. It makes no sense—why would he do that?
Perhaps Shane is giving Ilya an out, plausible deniability that he didn’t hear him and this doesn’t have to become a thing between them. Maybe he’s even allowing Ilya the chance to finish, in his weird Canadian polite way, hesitant to interrupt.
But now Ilya can’t bring himself to do it. He is capable of shame on occasion, and he’s pretty sure that’s what he’d been feeling all along while brazenly humping the bed beside his sleeping, unsuspecting rival; he had simply chosen to disregard it.
Now the feeling surges back in a cold, sobering tide that tastes like salt in his mouth and stings the corners of his eyes.
He pushes himself up onto his elbows, wincing when the fabric of his briefs brushes against his swollen cock. He breathes through the sensitivity, moving carefully from then on to avoid coming by accident, climbing off the bed while refusing to look at Shane, to check whether he’s actually awake.
As soon as the bathroom door shuts behind him, Ilya abandons any attempt at subtlety. He doesn't bother locking the door or running the faucet. He just drags his cock from his briefs and wraps a fist around it, brutally ineloquent, overtaken by a primal need to fuck something, anything, even if it's his own hand—though he wants it to be Shane, any part of Shane he could have. Ilya's mind is racing, glutted with it, a single image rushing to the forefront, vivid as memory: Shane spread out beneath him, held down by Ilya's thighs, eager when Ilya slaps his cock on his face, puckering his lips to brush against it, to taste it.
Distantly, the alarm goes off, muffled by the door, and Ilya gasps, squeezing the head of his cock. He imagines Shane suckling wetly on the tip, and then thrusting his tongue out so Ilya can come in his mouth.
Back in reality, Ilya spills in a heavy arc onto the floor and down his knuckles, and all he can think about is the wet heat of Shane's mouth. It's all he still wants as his knees buckle and he finds himself in a slow, desperate fall.