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By the second summer, Ilya had no fucking excuse. Shane was certain of that.
The first summer, Ilya had come to the cottage for two weeks with a suitcase so small it looked less like luggage and more like an escape plan. It looked like he had packed for a hotel hookup, a short mistake, something he could leave quickly if it became too much. He had brought too few clothes, beautiful useless shoes, a single sweater too thin for lake evenings, and the emotional confidence of a man who had clearly not expected to last the full fortnight in the Canadian wilderness; even the very comfortable rich-person version of it with indoor plumbing, good Wi-Fi, and a building for which the word cottage was a woeful understatement.
Shane had allowed that, mostly. He had enjoyed, more than was decent, watching Ilya discover that cottage life involved damp towels, cold mornings, insects with ambition, and darkness outside a city being less empty than full of noises that had no interest in explaining themselves. Ilya’s haunted expression over the mournful cry of the stupid loon still makes him laugh.
The first summer had been when the cottage became theirs in a way neither of them had planned, and both of them had wanted too badly to admit. This summer was different because their wanting had turned into logistics.
Ilya still belonged to Boston, but only on paper and only for a few more weeks. The transfer to Ottawa was something they had built together in careful pieces, with agents, lawyers, team conversations on one side and the two of them on the other, half-dressed in hotel rooms, talking around the size of it until there was nothing left to talk around. Ilya was coming closer because he had chosen closer, because Shane had said it would work, and Ilya had believed him, because Ilya had looked at the whole complicated machinery of borders, contracts, houses, visas and decided that being nearer Shane was worth the trouble.
Shane was so excited that it made him feel stupid.
In a few weeks, the plan would become official, and the thing they had built in private would start becoming visible enough that Shane would have to live with how much he wanted it.
So perhaps he was sentimental that morning. Perhaps he had been watching Ilya in the cottage with too much fondness, taking in the slope of his bare shoulder, wicked grin and the careless intimacy of him being there at all. Perhaps Shane had been more vulnerable than usual to the sight of him moving through space as if he already belonged in the ordinary parts of Shane’s life.
Then Ilya came out for their afternoon walk in Adidas slides.
Shane stood on the deck with one hand still on the sliding door and looked at him.
Ilya stood at the bottom of the steps in the sun, tall, loose and entirely pleased with himself. His shorts were black, easy on the eye, leaving long expanses of exposed skin. His shirt had no sleeves and barely any sides, just a dark suggestion of fabric hanging from his shoulders and exposing long lines of rib, lat, and warm gold skin whenever he shifted. His hair was pushed back from his face in that careless way that made him look as if he had either just had sex or was about to say something that would cause it, eyes obscured by dark sunglasses.
It was pure Slavic fuckboy, built for cigarettes outside a club, a filthy comment in a hotel lift, or a doorway before a bad decision. It was not clothing suited to a walk in the Canadian wilderness.
“No,” Shane said.
Ilya glanced down at himself. “What?”
“You are not wearing those.” Shane pointed down at Ilya’s feet.
“They are shoes.”
“They are shower shoes.”
“We go for little walk, yes?”
“In the woods.”
“Ok?”
“No, not ok. There are roots, mud, rocks, ticks, and several ways for you to make your feet my problem.”
Ilya looked down at his exposed toes and, for a moment, the confidence cracked into genuine concern. “What is ticks?”
“Just go and change your shoes. Wear some socks too.”
He considered this, then looked up at Shane with a slow curve of his mouth. “You worry for me.”
“I worry about carrying you back if you break an ankle.”
Shane could see the heat rise behind Ilya’s sunglasses before the smile reached his mouth, bright, challenging and far too pleased with himself.
“Could you?” Ilya asked.
Shane stared at him.
Ilya was maybe an inch taller than him, broader across the shoulders, heavier through the chest and back, all long strength and easy insolence. People saw him and understood size before anything else. They saw swagger, accent, money, sex and threat. They saw a man who filled space because he expected space to accommodate him and had enough easy arrogance to make that expectation look reasonable.
People saw Shane and got lazy.
Quiet, they thought, and made it mean soft. Polite and made it mean harmless. Controlled and made it mean cold, weak or manageable. Pretty, sometimes, in the mouths of people who wanted to turn it into a smaller category of man. They saw the shape of his face, his mother in his cheekbones, his quietness in rooms full of loud white boys who mistook volume for confidence and treated silence like a gap they had earned the right to fill. He had learned to let them be wrong until they found out otherwise, usually on the ice, sometimes against the boards, sometimes in the stunned second after he took the puck cleanly from a man who had believed, until impact, that Shane would fold.
He was strong, and he knew it in the practical sense of living inside a body he had spent years building, maintaining and testing against other professional athletes. The idea that thoughtfulness somehow overrode that all that was so fucking stupid he could not think about it too long without getting mean.
Ilya made many mistakes, including putting his bare skin within reach of every biting insect in Ontario and believing a sleeveless shirt was appropriate for a hike, but he had never looked at Shane and seen less.
Even from the beginning, Ilya had looked at him like something sharp. A man worth pushing because the push would come back. He saw him first as competition, then as obsession, then as a problem he wanted to put his mouth on, and somewhere along the way, he had started looking at him in a way that made Shane’s breath harden. He saw the parts Shane hid badly and the parts Shane did not know he was showing. He saw control and wanted to ruin it. He saw restraint and treated it as a personal challenge. He saw capability and, apparently, today, intended to test it against the natural world until one of them lost, but he never made Shane feel small or weak in his desire, even when fucking him so hard into the mattress Shane had to bite his fist to swallow the cries.
“Yes,” Shane said. “I could carry you. Now go change your fucking shoes, asshole.”
Ilya’s smile turned warm and dangerous.
Ilya stood there one second longer than necessary, making obedience feel filthy, then turned and went back inside. Shane watched him go because he had a functioning nervous system, and Ilya’s legs in those shorts were not something a person could reasonably ignore.
While Ilya changed, Shane added an extra flannel to his backpack. He already had water, insect spray and the small first-aid kit his father kept in the kitchen drawer because David Hollander did not believe in lack of preparation.
When Ilya came back out, he was wearing black trainers.
They were better than slides, which was all Shane was prepared to grant them. They looked expensive in the way Ilya’s things often looked expensive, but they still looked wrong for the outdoors; at least they covered his feet.
Ilya glanced at the backpack. “What is in slutty little bag?”
Shane rolled his eyes. “Water and a few supplies.”
“Knife?”
“No. What the fuck would I need a knife for?”
“For bears.”
“We will not see any bears.”
“For wolf-bird?”
“The loons are not armed.”
Shane looked at him for a moment, and Ilya’s eyes brightened because he knew he had made Shane want to laugh. That was one of the quieter ways Shane loved him; he worked for Shane’s amusement as if it were worth earning.
They set off behind the cottage, past the stacked wood, the bins, and the place where Ilya had once tried to open a bag of charcoal with a bread knife because he had been alone for less than a minute and believed all tools were interchangeable if held with enough confidence. The path began easily, packed earth and pine needles, ferns crowding the edges, the cottage disappearing behind them one warm piece at a time. The air smelled of pine, damp soil and summer heat.
Shane felt himself loosen as soon as the trees closed around them.
The woods behind the cottage did not require him to be understood; that was part of why he loved them. They required attention, decent shoes, and enough sense to duck before a low branch took out an eye, but they did not care whether he was quiet or polite. They did not ask him to perform strength in a way that satisfied men who only recognised strength when it announced itself loudly enough.
Ilya lasted perhaps five minutes before he walked into a spiderweb and flinched so violently he almost fell into the verge.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck”, he spat, trying to remove the silky web from his face and shirt while looking around with narrowed eyes. “Woods are homophobic, Shane.”
“Fuck off,” Shane laughed. “You’re such a city boy.”
Ilya’s mouth flickered. “You like city boy.”
Shane stepped over a root and pushed a branch aside for him. “I like parts of the city boy.”
That landed where he meant it to, and Ilya went quiet for a beat, the pleased kind of quiet, then followed close enough that Shane could feel him at his shoulder.
The trail narrowed where the ground lifted over old roots. Shane saw Ilya’s foot catch before Ilya did. He reached to his side without thinking and caught him by the bicep, stopping him just before his ridiculous trainer clipped hard into the raised wood.
Ilya looked down, then at Shane’s hand on his arm.
Shane let go. “Feet up, Rozanov.”
Ilya’s mouth twitched, but he stepped higher after that, following more closely than necessary. Shane could feel his attention on him now, warm between his shoulder blades, irritatingly pleased. It was ridiculous. Shane had not done anything except prevent his boyfriend from eating shit on a tree root, which was apparently enough to make Ilya look at him like Shane had split firewood shirtless with his teeth.
A few minutes later, Ilya angled towards what looked like a clearer cut through the trees, a little opening where the ferns thinned, and the ground appeared flatter.
“No,” Shane said, catching the back of his shirt and tugging him lightly away from it.
Ilya stopped. “What?”
“That’s a fucking bog.”
“Is dry.”
“It looks dry.”
Ilya looked at the ground, unimpressed.
Shane crouched, picked up a fallen stick and pushed it into the patch. The surface broke at once, dark water rising around the wood.
Ilya stared at it.
Shane dropped the stick and stood. “You’re welcome.”
For once, Ilya had no immediate reply. He only looked from the bog to Shane with something bright and thoughtful moving across his face, as if Shane, knowing the difference between dry ground and a mudtrap, had done something indecent to him.
The fallen pine came around the next corner, angled across the path where a storm had taken it down earlier in the season. Shane had been meaning to clear it properly, but it was not high, only awkward. He stepped onto the trunk, balanced on the rough bark, and dropped down the other side.
Behind him, Ilya went very quiet again.
Shane turned.
Ilya was still on the other side of the tree, sunglasses pushed up into his hair now, staring at him with an expression that was far too focused for a man delayed by woodland debris.
Shane raised an eyebrow.
Ilya blinked once. “Nothing.”
Shane narrowed his eyes.
Ilya climbed over the trunk with deliberate care, which would have been less funny if Shane had not already watched him throw himself bodily at men twice his size for a living. When he landed, he stood close enough that Shane could smell his sun-warmed skin.
“You jump over things very good,” Ilya said.
Shane stared at him for a second, then laughed despite himself. “That is the stupidest thing you’ve ever said.”
“No,” Ilya said, with feeling. “Say many stupider things.”
That, unfortunately, was true.
At the rise, Shane slowed near an old stump where glossy leaves had spread close to the path. Three leaflets, reddish stems, low enough to brush against skin if someone was too distracted to look where they were going.
“Don’t touch that,” Shane said. “It’s poison ivy.”
Ilya leaned forward, because of course he fucking did.
“Fuck, Ilya, I just said don’t go near it.”
Ilya straightened and pointed. “This little shit?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“It makes an oil that sticks to your skin and clothes. It’ll make you itch like hell and maybe blister.”
Ilya looked at the plant with cool offence. “Rude.”
He gave it one final, suspicious look, then stepped around it exactly as Shane had. Shane counted that as a success and kept going.
The path rose again, pulling them out of the damp, and Shane took the turn towards the ridge. The air shifted as they climbed with a resin smell from the pines and the faint coolness that came before the lake appeared between trees. Shane loved this part, where the forest thinned just enough to let light move; the ground uneven but familiar.
They climbed towards the ridge, and the lake opened through the branches in hard flashes of blue. Shane stopped near the old white pine where the trail flattened. The trunk leaned slightly towards the view, and the roots gripped the slope in thick, raised lines. It was one of his favourite places on the walk, high enough to catch the breeze, private enough that the rest of the world seemed to fall away.
Ilya came to stand beside him, shoulder brushing Shane’s.
For a while, he was quiet, and they just breathed in the green summer air.
Shane loved the comfortable silence more than he should. Ilya could be loud, filthy and relentless when he wanted to be, but he could also give silence when the silence mattered. He stood there in his ridiculous shirt with no sleeves, his expensive trainers, his sharp edges softened by lake light, and let the view settle over him.
“Did you ever do this as a kid?” Shane asked.
Ilya glanced at him. “What? Stand and look at things?”
Shane laughed. “No, like hiking outdoors. Russia has woods, right?”
Ilya barked a laugh. “Yes, Shane. Russia has woods. Biggest in world.”
Shane gave a gentle smile.
For a moment, he thought Ilya might make another joke, but his face got the shuttered look it sometimes did when he thought of Russia. He looked back at the lake and said, “My father had dacha.”
Shane’s face must have betrayed his confusion.
“Is like summer house,” Ilya said. “Outside city. Made of wood and very old. Had big garden full of flowers. So many colours. I remember the terrible toilet, always full of insects.” His nose wrinkled with such immediate disgust that Shane suspected the insects had remained offensive in memory.
“And you would visit?”
“Yes, during summer when I was young.” Ilya’s voice shifted, light in a way Shane knew meant careful. “I remember my mother there. I would lie on grass while she planted in garden. Was hot and air smelled beautiful. As I got older, summer became hockey training.”
Shane kept his eyes on the lake because watching Ilya say it would make the moment too bare. “Did you miss the dacha?” The word felt thick and clumsy on his tongue.
Ilya huffed once, dry and brief. “No, not after my mother died. Training camp had less fathers.”
The line was funny because Ilya made it funny, sharp, brutal and perfectly timed; it still hit Shane painfully. He pictured a small Ilya in heat, dust and flowers, his mother alive in the memory because memory was cruel like that, his father turning a summer cottage into somewhere a cold rink could be preferable. Shane had no use for the anger and sadness that rose in him, so he touched Ilya’s wrist instead, thumb pressing once against the bone.
Ilya smiled at him with such warmth that Shane felt the touch answer back somewhere in his chest. The air was humid, but the breeze kept off the worst of the summer heat. Shane looked at Ilya again, at how ridiculous he looked in this environment, and felt nothing but love for the man in front of him.
The warmth shifted between them as it had been doing that all morning, humour turning under their feet into something deeper, the joke still there but no longer safe. Ilya’s gaze moved from Shane’s mouth to the strap of the backpack over his shoulder, then down his arms, then back up. Shane felt it as a physical thing, as real as heat.
“You are different here,” Ilya said.
“What? How?”
“Cottage Shane.” Ilya’s finger hooked under the backpack strap and tugged lightly. “More relaxed in your beautiful skin.” He gave Shane a predatory look. “I love how sun makes your freckles darker.”
Shane could feel the blush rising from his neck.
“You stop pretending you are not in charge,” Ilya’s voice soft.
The words moved straight through him.
Shane thought of the porch, the slides and Ilya’s teasing voice, Could you? He thought of all those loud rooms full of men who saw quiet and assumed lack, who thought strength had to be loud to be real, who looked at Shane and edited him down to something easier. He thought of Ilya watching him now, visibly, shamelessly pleased, as if Shane being capable and strong had confirmed something Ilya already knew and still wanted to feel.
Shane moved before the moment could become words.
He caught Ilya by the waist, slid his hands down that frankly ridiculously ass, bent his knees slightly, and picked him up.
Ilya made a shocked, rough sound, hands grabbing Shane’s shoulders, eyes wide for one beautiful second before darkening as want flooded in. He was heavy, all muscle, heat and startled laughter, and Shane held him without apology before taking a few steady steps to the nearby pine and pressing Ilya’s back against it.
Bark scuffed at Ilya’s shoulders, and his thighs tightened around Shane’s hips. He threw back his head and laughed before Shane shifted closer and took the kiss he had been thinking about the entire way through the woods.
Ilya opened for him immediately, the pleased shock of being lifted turning into hunger. His hands went into Shane’s hair, then down his back, fingers gripping hard through the fabric of his shirt. Shane held him pinned against the tree, feeling the weight of him, the answer of his own body, the clean satisfaction of strength used without performance. It was not about proving anything. It was about Ilya knowing and wanting, about Shane being seen in the exact place other people misread him, about the private pleasure of holding Ilya up and feeling Ilya go hot and unsteady because of it.
The woods were warm and hidden, the lake flashing below. Shane rocked into him once, clothed, controlled and still enough to make Ilya’s breath break. Ilya swore into his mouth and Shane did it again because he was not a good person and because the sound went straight down his spine like liquid metal.
“Fuck,” Ilya said, voice low and wrecked. “Can I fuck you?”
“Not here.” Shane’s hips still rolling into Ilya. “I am not getting poison ivy on my ass.”
Ilya laughed again, then bit at Shane’s jaw. “Okay. Dock, yes?”
Shane’s grip tightened, opening his eyes that he had not realised he had squeezed closed. “What?”
“Dock,” Ilya said again, already trying to kiss him while speaking, which made him sound even rougher. “I will fuck you on dock.”
Shane had a memory of last summer; the warm wood beneath his back and the late-afternoon sun cooling towards evening. Ilya stretched out over him while the lake lay flat and shining around them, carrying every sound much further than Shane liked. The towel Ilya had lain him down on still made him blush a year later whenever he found it folded in the linen cupboard.
Shane kissed Ilya hard enough to make him shut up, then set him down, groaning at the loss of contact.
“Walk,” Shane said, pointing back down the path, and Ilya’s smile was bright and filthy.
They started back down the trail at a pace that was not quite a run because Shane had some self-preservation, and Ilya was still a liability. They were driven by heat, laughter and the stupid shared urgency of wanting Ilya’s mouth, Shane’s hands, all the privacy of the lakeside made bright and ridiculous. Shane went first because he knew the ground, and Ilya followed close behind, too close, his attention heavy between Shane’s shoulders.
The poison ivy patch came up beside the old stump.
Shane saw it, snapped his fingers and pointed in warning at the plant again, then stepped cleanly around it. There was a scuff behind him and then a soft rustle.
Shane stopped.
He closed his eyes for one second and let himself know, with absolute certainty, exactly what he would see.
When he turned, Ilya stood with one foot half off the path, and his bare lower leg brushed through the poison ivy.
“What?” he said, then looked down following Shane’s glare. His face went blank with the horror of delayed consequence. He looked at the plant, then at Shane, then down again.
Ilya held up a hand. “Don’t.”
“I have not said anything.”
“Your face is saying a lot.”
“My face is watching a grown man walk into poison ivy after being warned. Twice.”
Ilya stepped carefully back onto the path, suddenly very aware of his own limbs. “You distracted me.”
“Fuck off, how?”
“Walking with your ass.”
Shane pressed his lips together. The laugh still escaped, low and helpless, because it was so perfectly Ilya that affection moved through him before irritation could get any proper footing. Ilya Rozanov, elite athlete, architect of an international move to be nearer the person he loved, had been defeated by a plant because he was too busy staring at Shane’s ass while planning to fuck him.
“You walked into poison ivy because you were looking at my ass.”
“Yes,” Ilya said, with immediate dignity.
“My ass was minding its own business.”
Ilya started to bend down.
“No!” Shane yelled.
That sobered Ilya quickly. “What?”
“Don’t touch your legs or shoes. It can be really fucking annoying if the oil spreads. We need soap and water.”
The urgency changed shape. The dock disappeared from the immediate future, replaced by the outdoor shower, soap, laundry, and Shane’s vivid determination not to let Ilya transfer poison ivy oil from his leg to his hands, his face, Shane’s body, or any part of either of them that would make the next days deeply fucking inconvenient.
They made it back to the cottage quickly, Ilya walking with the careful fury of a man betrayed by both nature and lust. Shane could hear him muttering behind him in Russian, low and vicious. He caught Canada, plant, shoes, and what he was fairly sure was an insult directed at Shane’s shorts, which was stupid as they were normal, perfectly suitable shorts for the outdoors; they covered his knees and had pockets.
The cottage appeared through the trees, wood and metal warm in the afternoon light, windows flashing sky and lake. Shane took Ilya straight around the side to the outdoor shower, the one behind the weathered wooden screen, open to the trees above. The stone floor held the day’s heat.
“Strip everything off,” Shane said, holding out a plastic bag from the shed.
Ilya’s mouth curved, but he stripped carefully. He did not make a performance of it, which made it more intimate somehow. He pulled the shirt over his head, pushed the shorts down without letting fabric drag over his calf, stepped out of his socks, and left the trainers by the edge of the shower. Shane bagged the clothes and shoes to deal with later, then turned on the water.
“We will need to throw your shoes out,” Shane said,
“What! No!” Ilya looked grief-stricken.
“It will be too hard to get all the oil off. It’s not worth it.”
“They are limited edition.”
“I’m sure you can buy more shoes.”
“They cost four thousand dollars.”
For a second, Shane genuinely could not make language work.
Then he stared at him. “What the fuck are you spending four thousand dollars on shoes for?”
Ilya looked down towards the trainers with real mourning. “They were beautiful,” and stepped under the water, swearing as the cool spray hit him.
Shane watched him wash his hands first, then his calf, then the place where the plant had brushed his skin. The dock could wait. The sunshine could wait. Ilya was getting clean, he fine despite his own theatrical certainty that the plant had marked him for death, and Shane had managed to get him back to the cottage without letting him contaminate any further part of either of them.
It was a stupid little thing, really. A plant, a plastic bag, soap, water and one ruined pair of criminally expensive trainers. It should not have meant anything larger than that.
Except Shane could still feel Ilya’s weight in his arms. He could feel the solid heat of him against his chest, the hard pull through his own shoulders and thighs as he lifted him, the clean certainty of his body answering exactly as he had asked it to.
Ilya had not looked surprised, not really.
That was the part Shane kept coming back to while the water ran over Ilya’s calf and soap slid over his skin. Ilya had laughed, sworn, grabbed at Shane’s shoulders, gone hot and wanting in Shane’s hands, but he had not looked surprised that Shane could hold him. He had not looked as if Shane had become something else. He had looked as if Shane had shown him something he had already known and wanted anyway.
Shane could live with being seen like that.
“Next time,” Shane said, reaching past him to turn the water warmer, “wear normal fucking shoes.”
Ilya’s mouth curved, still wet, still dangerous, still entirely too pleased with himself for a man who had just lost a fight with shrubbery.
“Next time,” he laughed, “carry me sooner.”