Chapter Text
BIRTHDAY NUMBER 5
The cold in Ottawa had a completely different texture to that of Russia. It wasn't the dry, silent cold of his home; it was a sharp, metallic cold that bit into his cheeks and slipped mercilessly through the gaps in the second-hand jacket Ilya was wearing.
He was barely five years old, and his English vocabulary was reduced to three poorly pronounced words. To him, the outside world was an indecipherable echo, a mix of harsh sounds he couldn't quite understand. He hid behind his mother’s legs, clinging to the thick fabric of her coat as if he were on the edge of a precipice. They had gone to the ice rink that afternoon only because his older brother, Alexei, had insisted until he was blue in the face that Ilya would like it.
But Alexei, who was already adjusting his skates a few meters away with an indifference that Ilya envied deeply, didn't understand the terror that the white vastness of the rink provoked in Ilya. The echo of the rubber pucks hitting the acrylic boards and the hard floor sounded like gunshots in the enclosed space. Every crash made him shrink. Ilya didn't want to be there. He wanted the safety of his old room, the familiarity of his old language. He wanted his father not to have died, the warm fur of his dog Anya, the smell of tobacco from his grandparents. He wanted to go back, and not even the warmth of his mother’s palms rubbing his curls could dilute the deep, suffocating confusion that was drowning him. The entire world was out of focus for him, tinged with an oppressive and lonely gray.
And then, the gray exploded into a thousand pieces.
He was wearing a green practice jersey that was ridiculously big on him, he was missing a front tooth, and he had thick, messy, dark hair that peeked out rebelliously from under his protective helmet. But it was his eyes that caused Ilya to lose his breath; they were the brightest, liveliest brown eyes he had ever seen.
The boy braked by skating sideways right in front of him, kicking up a spray of sparkling frost that landed directly on Ilya’s worn-out boots, splashing his frozen cheeks, waking him up.
"Hi! Are you new?" the boy had shouted, his voice ringing loud, sharp, and clear over all the noise of the rink.
Ilya had instinctively shrunk away, clinging even tighter to Irina’s leg, completely overwhelmed by that sudden explosion of energy. He wanted to hide. But that boy didn't understand physical barriers, language barriers, much less shyness; he simply extended a gloved hand, small but surprisingly firm, and pulled him onto the ice without giving him time to doubt, without giving him time to be afraid.
That was the exact moment. The first clear frame Ilya would have of his own slow and devastating doom. "My name is Shane" he said, as he dragged him onto the rink and held his hands around Ilya’s.
Shane smiled widely at him, with that mouth missing a tooth, and it was as if someone had turned on a thousand-watt spotlight directly onto Ilya’s pale face.
Shane Hollander was cheeky, bright, and wonderfully noisy. He was the sun. And Ilya, who until that very instant had been freezing in the shadow of his own terror, gravitated toward that heat by pure, blind instinct.
When Ilya slipped awkwardly, Shane didn't laugh at him; he just squeezed his gloved hand tighter, holding him up, preventing him from falling. And in the mind of a five-year-old boy who had lost his home, his language, and his certainties, that firm hand became his new home. The world stopped being gray and terrifying; now it had a center of gravity, and he would do absolutely anything to ensure that that sun never, ever, stopped shining on him.
BIRTHDAY NUMBER 10
From that first day on the ice, the dynamic between them was set in stone. As they grew, Ilya’s sharp, observant child’s mind drew a perfect map of cause and effect. Ilya discovered with certainty that pleasing Shane was the fastest, safest, and most effective way to keep that blinding light shining exclusively on him.
On the day of his tenth birthday, Irina had insisted on organizing a party at the small Rozanov house. There were balloons taped to the walls, a chocolate cake on the kitchen table, and a dozen kids from the hockey team running through the halls like a pack of wild wolves, shouting and shoving each other. It was the kind of chaos any ten-year-old would have loved.
But Shane Hollander didn't like crowds when he wasn't the one dictating the rules of the game.
Halfway through the afternoon, while the other kids played swordsmen in the living room, Shane huffed. His brown eyes scanned the room with boredom before locking onto Ilya. He approached, tugged at the sleeve of Ilya’s new shirt, and whispered in his ear with that voice that was already beginning to be his only compass: "I’m bored, Ilya. Let’s go to your room. I want to play Space Invaders."
Ilya didn't hesitate for a fraction of a second. There wasn't an instant of internal conflict, not a hint of remorse for the guests he himself had asked to invite. He abandoned his own birthday party with the same ease with which he breathed. He left the cake intact on the table and ignored his mother’s exasperated calls from the kitchen.
None of that held any weight. The outside world was white noise; Shane’s voice was the only frequency Ilya tuned into.
Thus, if Shane wanted to play in the middle of practices instead of practicing shots, Ilya abandoned the puck without hesitation, regardless of the complaints that would come later from his coach. If Shane, in a burst of boundless energy, broke the neighbor’s window with a ball, Ilya stood in front of the house door. He looked the furious adult in the eyes and assumed the blame without blinking, enduring the shouting and the punishments, just to see the smile of gratitude and complicity Shane gave him in secret. And in the same way, if Shane wanted to play Space Invaders in the middle of a party, Ilya abandoned his own birthday.
That blind devotion molded every one of his actions. It was a loyalty that knew no limits or instinct for self-preservation.
They sat on the worn-out carpet of Ilya’s room, their shoulders brushing, the silence of the room broken only by electronic beeps, while the shouts of the other children echoed muffled from the floor below. Ilya, there, felt an absolute and expansive peace in his chest. He watched Shane’s profile out of the corner of his eye, illuminated by the intermittent, bluish flashes of the TV screen.
For Ilya, there was no sacrifice; being Shane’s chosen one, the only person Shane wanted by his side to escape the noise of the world, was a privilege Ilya treasured with an almost religious devotion. His ego didn't exist; it had dissolved to leave all that space for his friend’s will.
Ilya was voluntarily turning himself into a shield, a shadow, a soldier ready to immolate himself. And as long as he was sitting on that carpet, feeling the heat of Shane’s shoulder against his, receiving the glow of his absolute attention, Ilya felt that it was all worth it. It didn't matter that he was erasing himself.
BIRTHDAY NUMBER 15
But the unavoidable problem with orbiting so close to the sun is that, sooner or later, you start to burn.
Childhood devotion was easy, almost instinctive; it was a clean surrender, devoid of malice. However, that innocence disintegrated in the locker rooms of adolescence, replaced by a dense, almost palpable tension that made it hard for Ilya to breathe.
The air became heavy. The rules of the game had changed without anyone warning him, and his own body had become enemy territory.
They were fifteen years old, and Shane’s body had changed with the force of an avalanche. He was no longer the same short kid; his shoulders had broadened, his waist had narrowed, creating an imposing silhouette that blocked all light around him. His voice had dropped an octave, becoming a deep timbre that vibrated directly in Ilya’s chest every time he pronounced his name. His presence, once comforting, now occupied all of Ilya’s physical and mental space, suffocating him.
The day of his fifteenth birthday, celebrating it wasn't in the plans. But they were in the locker room after a brutal game that had left them covered in bruises and exhausted. And then, Shane, euphoric for having scored the winning goal in the final second thanks to a perfect assist from Ilya, threw himself onto him with an animal cry of victory.
The impact knocked the air out of his lungs, falling to the rubber floor and rolling around among choked laughter, surrounded by the sour smell of teenage sweat and adhesive tape. Shane pinned him down completely, crushing Ilya’s chest with his own, with his legs firmly fixed on either side of his hips.
"I told you, damn it, I told you!" Shane shouted, shaking on top of him. His face was inches from Ilya’s, overflowing with wild, overflowing joy.
Ilya tried to laugh, tried to push him off as they had done a thousand times before. But, suddenly, the friction of Shane’s thick, hard thighs against his, the crushing weight of his hips anchoring him to the floor, the scorching heat of his breath grazing Ilya’s jaw; everything stopped being a game. An electric, thick, and hot short circuit like molten lead raced down his spine, descending and concentrating heavily in his groin. Panic flooded him as he felt the treacherous, hard, and absolute response of his own body.
With his vision blurred by terror, he pushed Shane off with excessive, violent force, a movement born of pure survival instinct, almost throwing him against the sharp metal lockers. He mumbled an incomprehensible excuse, grabbed his things, and fled the locker room without looking back.
He ran. He ran until his lungs burned and the cold street air cut his throat.
Upon arriving home, the darkness of his room offered him no comfort. Ilya locked the door, threw his sports bag anywhere, and dropped to his knees on the carpet, hiding his face in his hands. His breathing was erratic, sounding too loud in the sepulchral silence of the house.
And he could still feel it.
It was as if Shane’s body had left a burn on his skin. He felt the phantom pressure of those thick thighs rubbing against his, the immovable weight of Shane’s hip crushing him, the hot breath hitting his neck. The friction, that damn suffocating friction, was still throbbing in his groin with a painful, heavy, urgent insistence that terrified him. Ilya clenched his thighs, letting out a choked moan that sounded more like pain than pleasure, hating himself for the way his body begged for more.
In the solitude of his room, surrounded by his hockey trophies and the echo of his own breathing, the truth hit him with the force of a bat to the stomach.
He liked boys.
The thought was poison in his blood. Ilya came from a traditional Russian family; he had grown up under the hard gaze of an implacable culture. He had spent his entire life in locker rooms, hearing the casual insults, the cruel jokes about "faggots," the words spat with disgust. Honestly, Ilya didn't give a damn if others liked men, he didn't care who the hell people slept with.
What destroyed him, what made him want to rip his skin off in strips, was that it was happening to him, to Ilya Rozanov. The disgust toward himself rose in his throat like bile; he felt that his own body was a deformed and defective prison.
But homosexuality wasn't even the real monster in the room. That was just half the sentence. The true hell was the subject of his desire. It was Shane.
Shane Hollander. His sun, his best friend, the boy who shared everything with him and who trusted him blindly. Shane, who was straight as an arrow.
Ilya grabbed his hair with both hands, pulling hard, trying to rip the image of Shane’s smile from his brain. Wanting Shane this way, wanting to rub against him, wanting to bury his face in his neck and possess him... God, it felt like the dirtiest and most unforgivable sin in the world. It was a vile betrayal. Shane had given him his unconditional loyalty, a pure, bright, and straightforward friendship, and Ilya was corrupting it from the shadows with thoughts that would make Shane look at him with absolute disgust.
He felt like a filthy predator. A monster deceiving one of the people he loved most in the world. Every time Shane hugged him from now on, every time he smiled at him with that blind confidence, Ilya would know he was lying, profaning something sacred with just his imagination.
He crawled into bed and curled up under the blankets, shivering violently, crying dryly, without tears, because the pain was too deep to let out. That day he discovered that he was, irrevocably and mortally screwed.
BIRTHDAY NUMBER 18
By the time he turned eighteen, Ilya had turned repression into an art form. A painful, exhausting one that demanded he be on guard twenty-four hours a day. And Ilya tried to fight it. He tried with all his might to be normal. He convinced himself that the body could force the mind, that if he followed the script well enough, the lie would eventually become the truth and the monster in his chest would starve to death.
So, he got a girlfriend, Chloe. The girl had organized a small outing to celebrate his birthday. She was beautiful, genuinely sweet, and was madly in love with him. Chloe looked at him as if he hung the stars in the sky, and it broke Ilya’s soul to know that he could only direct his gaze to the ground where Shane walked.
Ilya remembered with a deep and lacerating disgust the last time he was with her, on the same early morning of his eighteenth birthday. They were in the back seat of his car, parked on a silent road. Chloe was beneath him, sighing softly, scratching his back with her perfect, delicate nails. She was warm and willing, but Ilya had his eyes squeezed shut so tightly his head hurt, fleeing desperately from the reality he had in front of him. His mind, longing for the only contact he truly desired, systematically erased Chloe’s small hands and replaced them, in an act of silent betrayal, with calloused, manly hands gripping his hips roughly. He erased the soft, perfumed skin under his own fingers to imagine the raspy touch of a jaw covered in stubble. He imagined the crushing, comforting weight of Shane, his deep, dark, husky voice murmuring his name in the dim light, and Ilya submitting him.
For a few seconds in that forbidden reverie, Ilya was free. He let himself be carried away by the fantasy that it was Shane’s hard body moving beneath him, that it was Shane he was making gasp.
When Ilya finally reached his climax and opened his eyes, the cognitive dissonance was so violent he felt genuine nausea. The real world collided with him and broke his bones. Chloe was looking at him with pure, absolute adoration, with her hair messy and her cheeks flushed, and he only felt the abyssal void, the crushing despair that she, despite all her love, wasn't him.
It wasn't Shane. It would never be Shane.
Ilya broke up with Chloe a week later, unable to hold her gaze while she cried. He couldn't, he shouldn't keep using her. She deserved someone who saw her, not a person who only glimpsed a blurry substitute for his best friend.
After that breakup, Ilya abandoned the farce of heterosexuality, but he didn't seek the light. Instead, Ilya navigated the shadows: there were boys, furtive, quick, and clandestine encounters in cheap motel rooms. But even in that supposed liberation, Ilya remained chained by the neck like a dog. Sleeping with men was a pathetic farce, because always, without exception, he chose men who shared some painfully familiar trait; he sought cheap and useless comfort in bright brown eyes, in a loud and audible laugh, in an athletic build or tan skin. And his most miserly requirement, his sickest and most desperate fixation: freckles, freckles, freckles.
He sought broken fragments of Shane in the sweaty bodies of strangers, closing his eyes in the dark and praying, for a pathetic and fleeting minute, to be able to pretend that he finally had him, that he finally saw him. That Shane Hollander was finally his.
He assumed his bisexuality in absolute silence, locking it away under a thousand keys. He knew that never, under any circumstances, would he confess it to Shane.
Because Shane was brilliant on the ice, but he was even more observant off it. And Shane knew him too well; he knew how to read his dense silences, the way he clenched his jaw when he was nervous, and the subtlest micro-gestures. If Shane discovered that Ilya liked men, the equation would be solved in his head in a matter of seconds. Shane would review their last years together: every rejection of a hug, every averted glance in the showers, every stammered excuse, and the panic in Ilya’s eyes.
And the truth, naked, raw, and ugly, would destroy the only beautiful, lovely, and happy thing that kept Ilya alive: his friendship.
Losing Shane’s romantic love was a reality Ilya had already been used to living with, but losing the right to be by his side, losing his jokes, his smile, the simple privilege of breathing the same air as him, that would kill him.
So he sewed his lips shut, ready to carry his love, his jealousy, and his agony to the deep darkness of the night before risking losing his sun.
BIRTHDAY NUMBER 20
At nineteen, the whole world and their families celebrated when Los Centauros signed them both. They rented a luxurious apartment together, moved to Ottawa, and then, that should have been the best time of their lives.
And it would have been, if the universe didn't have such a sadistic sense of humor. Because everything went to hell the day Jessica was added to the equation.
Living together turned into a claustrophobic prison designed specifically for Ilya’s suffering. Jessica was smart, beautiful, and very funny. Perfect for Shane, Ilya could admit it with the weight of the confession burning his tongue.
And Ilya would have loved to hate her; that way everything would have been easier, hating her would have given him an easy target to spit all his venom at, but Jessica was genuinely good, impossible to hate; she included him in their plans, made him breakfast, and made Shane laugh with an ease that broke Ilya’s soul into irreparable fractions.
And it was exactly there, in the undeniable perfection of that girl, where the definitive clash occurred. Seeing them together, Ilya lost even the last and most pathetic of his hopes.
Seeing Shane so radiant, so fulfilled, and in love in such an overwhelmingly normal way, pushed him into an abyss of depression so dark, dense, and suffocating that he could barely recognize himself in the bathroom mirror; his reflection gave him repulsion. It returned an unrecognizable image of himself, drawn with dark circles under his eyes, bruised shoulders and arms, the loss of himself reflected in his own eyes.
Then the guilt began to eat him alive, adding to the agony; Ilya would sit on the edge of his bed in absolute solitude, with a vacant gaze, a constricted chest, and shaking hands, wondering with genuine horror if he really loved Shane, because if his love were pure, if it were real and selfless as preached in all the damn books, he should have been happy for his best friend. He should be glad to see him smile that way. But he couldn't; he simply didn't feel joy, worse yet, he seemed to be drowning. The monster of selfishness, envy, and bitterness gnawed at him from within like an acid. His love possessed no goodness; it was an open, infected, and festering wound that made him writhe in absolute misery while they celebrated their life in the room next door.
And that was what he hated most in the entire world: the drywall that separated his room from Shane’s. Because the true terror began at night, when he could hear the deep murmurs of Shane’s voice through the wall, and Jessica’s laughter in response to them. And then, the noises would change; the rhythmic, violent creaking of the headboard hitting the wall could be heard. Each blow against the drywall was a hammer blow directly to Ilya’s skull. He could hear the gasps, Shane’s voice, raspy and low. Shane losing control completely. Shane ejaculating.
Those nights, Ilya would cling to the sheets until his knuckles turned white, digging his nails into his palms to focus on the acute physical pain and drown out the knot of agony that was crushing his chest. The stinging in his bleeding hands was the only thing that anchored him to reality and kept him from screaming until his vocal cords snapped. The forced intimacy was consuming him alive. Ilya felt he was becoming a specter in his own home, a spectator who didn't enjoy the macabre movie playing out in front of him at all.
And so, most nights, Ilya would fall asleep crying.
In the dark, swallowing his own tears that tasted of salt and defeat, Ilya tried to remember the last time love had been something satisfying or happy. Perhaps it never had been. And he didn't understand why, as they grew older, as immaturity abandoned them, as innocence faded, he couldn't comprehend why the pressure in his chest just wouldn't yield. Instead of diminishing, the weight grew, like a malignant tumor threatening to swallow him whole.
And Ilya bled without stopping. He suffered a constant emotional hemorrhage for all to see, but the internal wounds were so many, so deep and scattered, that there were no longer enough patches to stop the bleeding. Pretending he was happy for Shane, putting on that smile in front of the perfect couple, became more physical, more painful every day. He felt that at any moment he would shatter into a thousand pieces and be left exposed, for all to see in his most pathetic and broken form.
Some days, hiding it was easy. Ilya could take the pain, fold it carefully as if it were a piece of paper until it was tiny, and store it in the back of his mind to be able to live for a few hours without that agony tearing at his veins. He could joke, train on the ice, and be the Ilya of old. But other days... other days, the bed was a tomb from which he could not, nor did he want to, escape.
The depression pinned him against the mattress with the weight of a lead slab. Not even hockey, his lifelong refuge, could pull him out of that state of miserable lethargy. Not even Shane himself. Nothing. Everything lacked meaning, because the one thing his body and soul were crying out for was eternally denied to him.
And the pain only increased to an unbearable level when Shane began to notice the cracks, beginning to hover around him with a fraternal concern that was like pouring acid on Ilya’s raw burns. "Ilya, are you okay?" he would ask him almost daily, with a furrowed brow and dark eyes full of genuine restlessness. "Ilya, what’s wrong? You’re very quiet today" he would insist during breakfast, trying to meet his gaze while Jessica served the coffee.
And then came the nights of confinement, when Ilya had no strength to fold up the pain and wouldn't leave his room for hours, and he heard the soft knocks against the wood resonating in his rib cage. "Ilya... open the door. Talk to me, what’s wrong?"
That voice, charged with such pure concern, was what woke him up. He was becoming dead weight, a black cloud floating over Shane’s happiness. His own misery was tarnishing the happiest moment of Shane’s life.
He couldn't take more than eleven months.
It was the same day of his twentieth birthday when he found the cowardly courage to run away. There was no cake, no toast, no celebration, only the harsh and dry sound of masking tape closing cardboard boxes in his room. Packing his life on his birthday was an act of poetic masochism, the official funeral of his youth and any stupid hope he still harbored.
He made the decision to go rot alone somewhere else, to rip himself out of his friend’s life by the roots and take the worry of his own existence off his shoulders. Under the excuse that his contract with the team allowed for a better investment, Ilya had bought an absurdly large mansion in the suburbs of Ottawa.
Shane was leaning against the bedroom door frame, arms crossed, an expression of confusion and territorial betrayal hardening his features. Shane didn't understand, and appeared deeply hurt by the decision.
"It’s your damn birthday, Ilya," Shane said, his voice tense. "Are you really doing this today? Why are you leaving like this?"
Ilya’s heart gave a painful jolt, threatening to tear his chest. He had to swallow saliva that tasted like ground glass to speak.
"Happy birthday to me, brother! I’m buying myself my own castle," Ilya lied, forcing a bright laugh that cost him half his life force. "Come on, we’re not two broke college kids anymore. You two need privacy for your love nest, or whatever. I’m doing you a favor by leaving the apartment for you and Jessica. You should be thanking me on your knees."
He laughed and smiled, patting Shane’s shoulder as he passed with a box. He hid absolutely everything behind walls of sarcasm; the fact that he was running away because he couldn't stand the pain, a pain that little by little was becoming a physical evidence.
He would have liked to spit the truth at him right there, in the middle of the hallway. To tell him that he was running away because every second under that roof was emptying his soul. That he needed to isolate himself desperately so he wouldn't have to see how Shane and Jessica loved each other so easily, while his own love was a dark poison that suffocated him daily. He wanted to scream at him that he was leaving just so he could writhe and rot in his own misery without having to lie to him and smile in his face every damn morning.
But it was his birthday, and he wasn't going to ruin their friendship on his birthday.
The bass of the music hit you directly in the chest before you could hear it. Ilya had an arm draped over Marleau’s sweaty shoulders, jumping in unison while the rest of the defensemen shouted the chorus of Only Girl (In the world) by Rihanna. The heat in the center of the living room was suffocating, a dense mix of cigarette smoke, perfume, and evaporated alcohol, but Ilya was completely surrendered to the chaos.
He laughed out loud when a team rookie stumbled and almost fell backward against the pool table. Ilya grabbed him by the jersey just in time, spilling a little beer on his own shoes, and ruffled his hair between taunts. He was celebrating his twenty-second birthday, his house was full, he was surrounded by his people, his blood was running hot and light through his veins, and for a miraculous moment, life felt easy. With his throat rasping from screaming stupid things, he gave Marleau a hard slap on the back and separated from the group, making his way with gentle shoves through the guests who were dancing, looking for the kitchen.
He reached the immense central island and placed both hands on the surface. The cold marble under his hot palms was an immediate relief. He grabbed a thick bottle of vodka, dropped three ice cubes into a crystal glass, and poured the clear liquid.
While the alcohol swirled through the glass, his eyes rose. It was an involuntary movement, an order his body executed before his mind could authorize it. He could be in a packed stadium with twenty thousand people or in an empty hotel hallway, and his internal radar always needed to locate the exact coordinates of Shane Hollander.
He found him. Shane was reclining in the center of one of the black leather sofas, and he wasn't alone; Jessica was sitting astride one of his thighs. She was moving her hands in the air exaggeratedly, telling some anecdote to the group of friends surrounding them. Shane had a hand resting with crushing naturalness on her waist, with his thumb lazily stroking the fabric of her dress.
Jessica reached the punchline of her story, and the entire circle erupted in laughter.
Shane threw his head back, exposing the strong line of his throat. The impulse of laughter shook his entire chest. At that distance, and under the flashing lights, Ilya couldn't hear him, but he knew the sound by heart: the warm vibration of that laugh reproduced automatically inside his own head.
His best friend’s eyes shone with raw, unfiltered joy, looking exclusively at her. The smile was immense and dazzling. Ilya stood motionless, with the ice melting in his glass. A sharp, icy physical pain stabbed under his ribs and emptied his lungs.
That absolute peace, that devotion, that ability to laugh with his whole body, losing control and perfect posture, all of that belonged to Jessica. Shane had handed the keys to his happiness to her, and she used them with an ease that unbalanced Ilya.
Ilya could be his best friend, his skating partner, his brother; but always, for the rest of his damn life, he was going to be on the other side, watching how the person he loved most built his home in someone else.
With his throat closed and his eyes burning from the humiliation of his own feelings, Ilya brought the rim of the glass to his lips, and swallowed the pure vodka in one desperate movement. The liquid set fire to his larynx, going down his esophagus like acid, burning exactly where he needed it to burn.
He slammed the empty glass against the marble with a dry click. He had been a complete idiot to believe that running away would solve anything. Moving out of the apartment they shared, isolating himself in this gigantic mansion to stop seeing them interact all day, hadn't erased absolutely anything. And two years had already passed. Every time he had them face to face again, the same suffocating pain returned, intact, stabbing into his chest with devastating force. It was a parasitic feeling that simply wouldn't go away, wouldn't diminish, wouldn't give him any respite. And Ilya didn't understand why. Why couldn't his brain just let it go? Why did it hurt exactly the same as the first day?
He closed his eyes tightly and shook his head, trying to physically expel the suffocating spiral he always fell into. Not today, he told himself. It was his birthday and he refused to sink into his own misery. He wanted to cling with tooth and nail to that cheap, light happiness he had been building on the dance floor just a few minutes ago.
He was reaching for the thick crystal bottle when a heavy arm hooked him by the neck, trapping him in a friendly headlock that reeked of beer.
"Seven minutes in heaven for the birthday boy!" Marleau shouted directly into his ear.
Before Ilya could break free or complain, the rest of the defensemen pounced on him amidst rough shoves, laughter, and whistles that resonated above the music, dragging him into the hallway. It was a clear locker room stupidity brought into his living room: grabbing the birthday boy, pulling a random guest by the arm, in this case, a dark-haired boy, and pushing them together into the immense coat closet to the cry of a teenage joke.
The heavy wooden door slammed shut behind them and the darkness was absolute.
The noise was reduced to a dull murmur that made the floorboards vibrate.
Ilya let out a heavy sigh, resting the nape of his neck against the wooden door; his head felt heavy. He expected to stay there with his arms crossed, endure that discomfort for a couple more seconds, and walk out laughing humorlessly at his friends' stupidity. But he blinked several times, forcing his vision until his pupils dilated in the gloom, fixing them on the boy who was standing a few centimeters away, who was objectively beautiful: he had fine features, a delicate jawline, large eyes, and slightly messy hair. And he didn't seem uncomfortable with the confinement at all; he held his gaze in the darkness and the intention in his posture was evident. He wanted him.
The vodka buzzed in his temples and that boy’s availability was the escape hatch to drown the acid knot burning his throat. He wanted that quick hit of dopamine, that physical, plastic, and anesthetic distraction that sex and alcohol always managed to give him. It was a lifeline, an exit he didn't have to think about. So without hesitation, Ilya raised his arms, and his hands, a little clumsy and heavy, found the boy’s hips, pulling him firmly, breaking the distance and slamming his mouth against his.
The boy responded instantly, parting his lips enthusiastically, and a strong taste of lukewarm beer clashed against Ilya’s tongue. Ilya pulled him closer to his body, seeking physical friction, wanting to lose himself once and for all in the heat of another.
But as their mouths moved, lethargy settled into his nerves.
His lips operated on autopilot. The stranger let out a small moan against his mouth, pressing against his chest, but Ilya was experiencing a total disconnection. The vodka numbed his senses but not enough to ignore the absolute void inside him.
He had a beautiful boy giving himself over in the dark, rubbing against him, and his own body was completely dead. The contact didn't ignite absolutely anything.
The stranger broke the kiss with ragged breathing, lowered his hands down Ilya’s abdomen, groping blindly until he knelt on the carpeted floor. The strident sound of the zipper going down tore through the silence of the confinement, and a second later, the boy’s hands freed him and his hands began to do their work.
Ilya swallowed with difficulty. He had barely managed a semi-erection fueled only by the rough rubbing of his clothes seconds earlier, and now, instead of hardening, he was losing it. The boy’s rhythm was constant, he was trying, but Ilya’s muscles were tense with anxiety.
React, he ordered himself. Come on, react.
Shame rose up his neck, hot and thick. It wasn't getting hard. His body was failing him in the most pathetic way possible in front of another person, and if he couldn't manage to function and the boy came out and opened his mouth, the humiliation would be unbearable. His palms were sweating and, to make matters worse, his mind was still stuck on the other side of that damn wooden door.
Shane was out there. Shane was with Jessica, touching her, laughing with her.
He clenched his teeth and tried to cling to physical sensation. He focused on the hot mouth that was now enveloping him, on the moisture, on the constant rhythm, praying that the stimulation would drown out the noise in his head. He desperately needed the pleasure to empty him of Shane.
But his body remained inert. The boy redoubled his effort, emitting a sound of frustration in the gloom, and Ilya’s panic reached its limit. He was going to walk out of that damn place dragging his own humiliation.
With ragged breathing, Ilya gave up; if he wanted his body to respond, if he wanted to leave that confinement with his pride intact, he had to inject himself with the only thing his blood recognized: he erased the stranger from his head and forced his brain to project the image of his best friend.
He imagined large hands, raspy from the constant friction of hockey gloves, gripping his hips with a territorial force capable of leaving bruises. He visualized the rough texture of those fleshy lips against his skin, the dark gaze devouring him from below with hunger, the bridge of his nose peppered with freckles. Freckles, freckles, freckles, and more freckles.
Ilya’s body reacted with painful violence. The erection arrived almost like a lash, fueled by a desire so black, desperate, and forbidden that it wrenched a broken gasp from him in the darkness.
When the physical spasm ended and the boy stepped aside to adjust his clothes, Ilya slumped heavily against the door. Cold sweat stuck his shirt to his back, and the wave of self-loathing crushed him. Using Shane as a dirty fantasy to be able to function and finish with a stranger made him the worst scum on earth.
The door opened abruptly.
The silence in the hallway lasted a microsecond before the crowd erupted. No one, not even Marleau, expected them to actually stay the full seven minutes. The whistles, howls, and applause of his teammates shook the house; the morbidity and surprise that something had truly happened inside drove them crazy.
The dark-haired boy came out first. He wiped the back of his hand across the corner of his lips, looking dangerously flushed and satisfied, receiving pats on the back from the drunkest guests.
Ilya came out a second later.
He advanced, adjusting his belt buckle with stiff, clumsy fingers, his gaze fixed on the floorboards, forcing a plastic smile for the audience that cheered him on loudly. The humiliation burned him alive.
When he finally looked up, all the chaos lost importance. He collided with Shane’s gaze.
Shane hadn't been part of the joke; he hadn't been in the group that pushed them. He had just arrived in the hallway, pushing his way through the crowd, just in time to see the boy come out with wet lips, followed by Ilya adjusting his belt. And he was petrified a couple of meters away, his jaw clenched with such violence that the tendons in his neck threatened to burst under his skin. But it was his eyes that destroyed Ilya. They were two dark, lethal pits, scrutinizing the boy and then him, distilling a frigid fury.
A repulsion so raw and absolute that Ilya’s stomach emptied.
He stepped back, clumsy, hitting his back against the door’s wooden frame.
The air disappeared from his lungs. He knows.
The certainty fell on him like a ton of rubble. Shane was looking at him as if he were the most disgusting thing in the world. He knows I was with a man. I disgust him. The secret he had buried in the depths of his being for years, the last thing that protected their friendship, had just been blown open in front of everyone. And his best friend’s reaction was exactly the nightmare he had always feared.
The instinct to flee was purely animal. Unable to hold eye contact for a single second longer without breaking right there, Ilya lowered his head. He walked with stiff steps, bumping into bodies in the hallway, until he reached the guest bathroom door.
He entered with a slam and locked it.
His hands were shaking so violently that it was hard for him to turn the faucet. The cold water splashed the marble. He plunged his palms, soaked his face and neck, rubbing his skin hard, as if he could scrub away the shame. He leaned with all his weight on the edge of the sink, his chest rising and falling erratically, and looked up.
The mirror returned the image of a miserable guy. He had bloodshot eyes. The party music vibrated in the tiles, but in his ears, there was only a high, deafening hum. He wanted to convince himself it was the alcohol, wanted to repeat to himself that Shane hadn't understood the situation, that he was just drunk, that tomorrow it would all be a stupid anecdote they would laugh about.
But the bile in his throat wouldn't let him lie to himself. Shane’s disgusted look was still burning his retinas. He had lost him.
Upon leaving the bathroom, in the hallway and a few meters away, he recognized Shane’s broad back, moving away toward the back door with heavy steps, as if he were about to hit someone.
"Shane?" Ilya closed the distance almost running. His voice trembled, coming out barely as a scratch. He needed to reach him, invent a lie, tell him it had been a joke forced by the team, anything. "Are you okay?"
Shane stopped dead. He barely turned his neck, enough to nail him with a gaze over his shoulder. The expression on his face was completely stripped of the fifteen years of brotherhood they shared, loaded with a hostility that Ilya had never received from him.
"Get lost, Ilya."
It was a direct hit to the sternum. His voice cut the skin, disgusted, cold, deadly. Without adding another word, as he passed by him, he rammed his shoulder against Ilya’s with deliberate aggression, pushing him with such force that it made him stumble and hit his back against the hallway wall.
Ilya remained glued to the wallpaper, paralyzed, the air escaping him in a mute gasp. The words echoed in his head like a final sentence. He was blinded by pain.
He walked toward the bar moving like a corpse, making his way with weak shoves through the crowd that was dancing. He grabbed the first bottle of vodka he found uncapped, ignoring the glasses, and brought it to his lips. He drank directly from the spout. The liquid went down burning his throat, filling his stomach with fire, but Ilya only swallowed more, praying the alcohol would shut off his brain.
The party blurred into fuzzy spots. Alcohol flowed heavily in his blood, but it couldn't turn off his brain’s destructive lucidity. Around two in the morning, unable to keep breathing his own farce, he dragged himself toward the immense glass doors that led to the backyard. He pressed his forehead against the cold glass, fogging it with his irregular breathing.
Outside, under the yellowish light of a streetlight, Shane had Jessica cornered against the wooden railing of the gazebo, kissing her. It was a desperate, voracious, violent clash. Shane’s hands gripped her hips, pulling to crush her against his own body, as if he were trying to merge with her, as if he needed to erase the image of Ilya and the closet from his head.
Ilya remained motionless on the other side of the glass. Memory, sadistic and untimely, returned a recent dialogue they had had in the locker room a few months ago. "I think I’m going to marry Jessica, Ilya," Shane had said, looking at his skate laces with a soft, private smile that had broken Ilya’s soul. "I love her like no one else."
Oxygen abandoned his lungs. A dark, heavy mass settled in his chest, crushing his heart. Shane liked women; he loved Jessica. And him, his best friend, he was repulsed by. They were immutable facts; a raw truth that the night was rubbing in his face.
Before the pain finished buckling his knees right there, Ilya looked away and pushed the heavy glass door with his shoulder. The biting cold of the early morning hit his face, but it didn't even make him blink. A few meters away, at the lower part of the patio, at the edge of the pool, Cliff, Troy, and Wyatt were passing a marijuana cigarette amidst guffaws.
Ilya walked down the steps with automatic movements. He approached and snatched the smoking joint from Cliff’s fingers without saying a single word, bringing it to his lips and inhaling deeply. The thick smoke scraped his trachea as he exhaled. The marijuana began to weigh on his limbs almost immediately, loosening his muscles, but his mind was still racing a mile a minute.
Romantic rejection was a predictable pain, an open wound he had learned to live with. Ilya leaned against the outer wall of the house, feeling his legs fail him. He had always known that his secret had the power to destroy their relationship, but facing reality was a torture he hadn't calculated well. That look of Shane’s in the hallway... it had fractured him irreparably.
He let out a trembling sigh, feeling like he was drowning. If he had been given a choice, he would have preferred to swallow his love in silence for the rest of his life, suffering every day, rather than lose his best friend. Because, above the jealousy and romantic devotion, Shane was his brother, his family, half of his damn soul. And Shane, the boy for whom Ilya would have given his life without a second thought, had looked at him with profound disgust, simply for having been with a man. That homophobic disappointment in Shane’s eyes hurt more than a thousand rejections.
The overstimulation of the environment became unbearable. The bass of the music thundered against the glass windows, the smell of grass and sweat suffocated him, and the image of Jessica and Shane devouring each other a few meters away remained alive in his brain.
He passed the joint to Cliff and fled. He dodged the crowd, ignoring the people who tried to congratulate him on the party, his birthday, or whatever they were saying to him with voices distorted by alcohol. He ran up, stumbling on the steps, dragged by desperation and the lethal mix of alcohol and drugs buzzing thickly in his bloodstream.
He locked himself in his room, but the walls still vibrated from the music coming from the ground floor. He undressed with erratic movements, tearing off the clothes that reeked of smoke and his own misery, leaving them lying on the bathroom floor.
When he got into the shower, and pressed his heavy forehead against the cold tiles, closing his eyes, tears mixed with the drops of water falling. They were violent, desperate sobs that contracted his rib cage; he cried for the love he would never have, but above all, he cried for the irreparable loss of his best friend.
Twenty minutes later, he turned off the tap. He was exhausted. His skin burned and his brain floated in a dense mist, anesthetized by crying and the drugs. He dried off with mechanical movements, dragging the white towel over his body until it was wrapped firmly around his hips. His blonde hair dripped heavily onto his shoulders, cooling the back of his neck, and the dense steam followed him like a ghostly trail when he stepped out of the bathroom and took a barefoot step toward the bedroom carpet.
And then, his heart stopped dead.
Click; the sharp sound of the metal lock turning cut through the hum of the music.
Ilya looked up suddenly, his pulse racing in his ears.
Shane was leaning against the closed door, having locked it. He was wearing the same dark clothes from the party, but his posture was that of a cornered predator. He was clearly drunk, but his alcoholic lethargy couldn't mask the tremendous tension radiating from his body; he seemed like a high-tension cable about to burst. He was breathing hard, with flared nostrils, scanning Ilya up and down.
The mix of sensations threatened to make Ilya faint. The music thundering from the floor below, where Jessica, teammates, and dozens of strangers kept dancing, oblivious to everything. The smell of soap and steam from the bathroom clashing with the smell of alcohol and cologne emanating from Shane.
The little sanity and patience Ilya had left flew out the window. The pain was buried by a pure indignation, born of exhaustion.
"What the hell are you doing here, Shane?" Ilya’s voice came out sharp, broken, trembling with indignation. He took a step forward, clenching his fists at his sides. "You’ve been acting like an absolute asshole all night, you treat me like I disgust you, and now you barge into my room. What the hell do you want? Come to judge me in private?"
Shane detached himself from the door slowly, advancing toward Ilya, invading his personal space, cornering him with a presence so dense and dominant that he had to step back, until the back of his knees hit the edge of the mattress.
"What’s wrong with me?" Shane growled, raspily, his voice vibrating in Ilya’s bare chest. "You’re the one locking yourself in a damn closet to get blown in the middle of a party. And with a damn guy."
The blind fury, born from the deepest wound of his soul, exploded out of Ilya.
"It’s none of your damn business what I do or who I sleep with!" he yelled at him. He raised his face to confront him, his eyes threatening to overflow again. "You have no right to look at me with such disgust! Get out of my damn room!"
But Shane’s proximity, the scorching heat radiating from his body, and the unwavering intensity of that gaze ended up destabilizing Ilya’s precarious balance. When trying to take another step back to get away from him, he tripped over his own feet and fell backward onto the mattress. The physical and mental exhaustion crushed him, and the hum of the party below seemed to keep mocking him. He closed his eyes, giving up. This wasn't how he should be spending his birthday. It wasn't fair.
"Get out of my room, Shane," he murmured. His voice was completely stripped of anger, sounding only like an agonizing weariness, a broken plea. "Just... leave me in peace."
But Shane didn't move toward the door.
The mattress sank sharply under a crushing weight. Before Ilya could react or even open his eyes to push him off, Shane’s solid, hot, and immovable body fell directly on top of him. Shane’s legs trapped Ilya’s hips, pinning him completely against the sheets in a single movement, while his hands anchored themselves on either side of his head, trapping him.
Ilya’s eyes snapped open. Panic and adrenaline surged through his blood. Shane’s face was millimeters from his, and there wasn't a single trace of the relaxed best friend, the fraternal brother, or the boy with the easy smile. There wasn't even disgust or disappointment. Shane’s eyes burned with a territorial and so fiercely savage possessiveness that Ilya’s heart stopped in his chest. He was breathing heavily, looking at him with a desperate, dark hunger that Ilya had never seen in him before.
Time fractured. Downstairs, the bass of the music kept making the walls vibrate; upstairs, the dense silence of the locked room was broken only by the clash of their ragged breathing. Ilya felt the rough friction of Shane’s jeans pressing hard against the thin fabric of his towel, and an involuntary moan, charged with need and years of absolute repression, threatened to escape his trembling lips.
Shane didn't ask for permission, didn't whisper any apology, didn't give explanations, didn't talk about Jessica, or the closet. He simply lowered his head and slammed his mouth against Ilya’s.
It was a brutal clash, devoid of any hint of tenderness. A desperate kiss, full of teeth, possessive fury, alcohol, and a territorial claim that neither of them fully understood. The surprise paralyzed Ilya for a microsecond, cutting off his oxygen. His mind, drugged, wounded, and overstimulated, screamed in terror and unreal ecstasy at the same time. And then, the desire repressed, mutilated, and denied for more than a decade detonated inside him like dynamite.
His hands, which had risen weakly by instinct to push Shane’s chest, trembled in the air. They hesitated for a fraction of a second before flying upward and burying themselves deep in the thickness of the dark hair. Ilya tugged at the strands with violence, pulling him even closer, refusing to let him go. He moaned into Shane’s mouth, parting his lips, surrendering completely, not caring about the consequences or the imminent disaster.
This was the only thing that had kept him alive all these years. Shane drowned that sound by devouring his mouth, taking everything Ilya offered him with animal voracity.
The towel slipped from his hips, forgotten, as Shane let his entire weight fall on top of him, crushing him against the mattress, erasing fifteen years of silence, pain, and shadows with the force of his kiss.
When their mouths finally separated from the need for oxygen, a thread of saliva glistened between their lips. Shane’s breathing was shattered, looking down, fixing his eyes directly on Ilya’s groin, where his erection pushed strongly. Exposed and visible to the cold air after the towel fell.
A burning shame hit Ilya’s stomach; they had been naked in front of each other countless times in the past, but Shane had never seen him erect. A visceral, almost paralyzing shame gripped his throat. And he was painfully hard, and it had been ridiculously fast. His mind flooded with doubts; he didn't know if, upon colliding with the physical reality of the situation, upon seeing another man, Ilya, his best friend, with his penis throbbing for him, Shane would panic and run out the bedroom door.
But on the contrary, Shane lowered his hips, aligning his pelvis directly over Ilya’s erection.
Ilya choked on a cry when Shane began to rub against him with raw desperation. Even through the thick fabric of Shane’s jeans, the friction was electric, maddening. Shane pushed down, seeking more contact, grinding his groin against Ilya’s, moaning against his neck, clutching his bare shoulders, and losing any trace of pride. "Please..." Shane pleaded, his hot breath hitting the sensitive skin under Ilya’s jaw. His voice was a raspy, unrecognizable whisper. "Please, Ilya. Fuck me. Fuck me now."
Ilya gripped his hips, digging his fingers into his sides to stop the friction before he came right there, and nodded, swallowing hard, his eyes burning. Shane didn't need another confirmation, so he jumped up and got rid of his clothes with almost violent urgency. The t-shirt flew to some dark corner of the room, as did the jeans along with the boxers, leaving Shane completely naked, glorious, throwing himself back onto the bed and trembling with pure anticipation on top of it.
Ilya felt his throat go dry. He had already seen him without clothes countless times; out of the corner of his eye in the showers after hard training sessions, in those years of silent torture where Ilya forced himself to stare at the wall, forcing himself not to look too much, not to desire him. But having him like this, now, was another story: exposed on his own bed, with a semi-erection peeking out between his thighs, sweaty and explicitly excited by him. He plunged into a state of total madness. The scene and this Shane, so real and tangible, surpassed any fantasy he had ever had.
With his pulse pounding hard in his ears and still assimilating the image, he reached toward the nightstand and groped blindly until he found the bottle of lubricant. Shane tried to approach again, impatient to climb on top of him, but Ilya put a firm hand on his chest, forcing him to lie back.
"Slowly," Ilya murmured. His voice trembled from the superhuman effort to contain himself, but his eyes were fixed on Shane’s. "If we’re going to do this... I’m going to do it right. I’m not going to hurt you."
He poured a generous amount of cold liquid onto his index and middle fingers, and turned toward Shane, settling between his legs. The temperature contrast made him shudder from head to toe when Ilya caressed his entrance gently, spreading the lubricant over the fold. Shane let out a sharp groan and threw his head back against the pillow, exposing his neck. Ilya pressed the pad of his first finger, entering with tortuous slowness, and Shane’s interior wrapped around him instantly, sucking the finger with an avidity that made Ilya’s eyes water with pure wonder. He moved his finger calmly, pumping slowly, stretching the walls, massaging with devotion.
But then, the terror returned to scratch the back of his neck. "Shane..." Ilya managed to articulate, stopping the movement for a fraction of a second. Desperation tore at his voice. "Look at me, tell me you’re sure. Because if I keep going... there’s no turning back."
Shane opened his eyes, heavy and darkened by lust, and sat halfway up. He trapped Ilya’s face between his hands and kissed him again, this time deeply, possessively, and resoundingly.
"Shut up, Ilya," he growled against his lips, sliding one hand to pull gently on his curls. "I want you."
The certainty in his tone was the final blow to any doubt. Ilya let out a trembling sigh and added a second finger, sinking deeper. Shane sobbed into his mouth when Ilya’s fingertips grazed his prostate for the first time; his hips jumped involuntarily upward in search of the pressure.
"That’s it, relax for me..." Ilya murmured, kissing his jawline while he flexed his fingers in a constant and damnably pleasant movement. He took his time, forcing Shane to wait. He ensured every muscle yielded under his touch, drowning in the brunette’s moans and in the slippery friction of his fingers entering and exiting. He wanted to devour him alive, to sink into him to the hilt.
When Ilya added a third finger, Shane groaned aloud, opening up completely and melting around his hand. Only when Ilya was sure he was relaxed enough to receive him without pain, he began to withdraw his fingers slowly. Shane, on the verge of absolute desperation, didn't waste a single second: he turned them both over, leaving the brunette astride, and wrapped his hand around the base of Ilya’s erect penis with a trembling hand, guiding the tip toward his own entrance, already lubricated and ready.
Ilya could barely breathe, much less articulate a word, immersed in that trance and dragged by a wild impulse, he settled under the other man’s body and lifted his hips to facilitate the task. In the back of his mind, the last vestiges of his rationality tried to remind him of things like condoms, but he couldn't stop. He wanted it so much it hurt.
When the tip finally grazed Shane’s anus, Ilya let out an audible sigh and Shane looked at him fixedly, with a gaze charged with panic and a desire so dark it was blinding. Ilya wondered if his own face would reflect the same, because God, he was terrified. This ruined everything, but Ilya wanted it so much that he bit his lips in pure anticipation. His chest rose and fell erratically, and his heart hammered against his ribs with colossal force.
When Shane began to slide on top of him, sinking slowly onto his member, Ilya gripped his hips hard, anchoring himself that way so he wouldn't drag himself upward and finally undo that minimal distance that separated them. By the time Shane was sitting completely on his lap, a guttural moan escaped Ilya’s lips; Shane gasped with eyes wide open in surprise, while his thighs trembled around his hip.
"Fuck, Ilya..." Shane whispered, stopping for a second to get used to the invasion, to the stretching. Ilya exhaled hard and settled back under him. The subtle movement caused the member to slide a little bit out, tearing an audible moan from both. "Damn, you’re so big," Shane groaned in a complaint, without breaking eye contact, before starting to lift his hips. The darkness in Shane’s eyes wasn't just desire, it was hunger, a pure possessiveness. And then, the whole weight of the night fell on Ilya. Shane’s tense jaw at the party, his dull fury, the irrational demands: they were jealousies. Shane had been jealous. Of him. His heart gave a jolt so violent against his ribs that he tasted adrenaline in his throat.
Ilya looked away from him, needing to close his eyes to concentrate exclusively on the overwhelming sensation of being buried inside Shane Hollander. Of his best friend. Of the love of his life. Shane’s interior squeezed him with such force it bordered on pain, but God, it felt like absolute glory, as if he had finally reached the goal of his life.
When he came to and opened his eyes, his hands remained firm on Shane’s hips; he let himself fall hard, forcefully, which caused Ilya to let out a choked cry, while his mouth remained open in an "O" shape in surprise. And the relief was so immense that he almost came in that same instant.
"Ah!" Shane screamed, rolling his eyes back and biting his lower lip in protest, while he repeated the movement slowly.
Ilya was in heaven, and he wanted to have his phone on hand to immortalize that image and record it in his mind forever: Shane impaling himself on his cock, his knuckles white from the force with which he gripped his shoulders, his neck arched backward, and his reddened lips under his own teeth.
That was what finally broke his sanity. Ilya went crazy.
With a brusque and possessive movement, he flipped them over on the mattress. Shane let out a gasp at the sudden change, finding himself trapped beneath Ilya’s body. Without wasting a second, Ilya hooked the brunette’s legs over his forearms and resumed the penetration. Shane arched his back, moaning loudly, scratching his shoulders, and opening his eyes wide. He wasn't penetrating with force; he was simply maintaining a slow and deep rhythm, letting Shane’s body get used to the sensation. The way Shane’s legs gave way and opened with such ease under his grip was impressive. A twisted and almost vengeful thought crossed his mind as he sank a little deeper: those damn yoga classes that Shane attended only to please Jessica were gifting Ilya a fascinating flexibility of which he, and only he, was now the absolute owner.
Shane kept his gaze fixed on the point where their bodies joined, mesmerized, and Ilya smiled at him; he looked like an overwhelmed puppy.
"Are you... Okay?" he asked in a raspy voice, accelerating the rhythm, and increasing the depth of each thrust. The friction tore a new string of groans and broken sighs from Shane.
"Yes, Ilya... Fuck," he responded, closing his eyes again and throwing his head back against the pillow for a moment. "More..." he demanded, lowering his hands to his buttocks and pressing there to reaffirm the demand. "Faster."
"Damn it," Ilya was heard saying at the surprise of Shane’s words. And as Ilya had always done: he pleased him.
He let his entire weight fall on him and began to thrust into him with all his strength, still careful not to hurt him, but the thrusts were now fast and of devouring depth. He let out a guttural moan; the image alone of having Shane beneath him was disarming him, but feeling his interior throb and swallow him more and more, taking him so well, opening for him, made another moan escape his mouth. Shane was now sobbing, breaking into loud moans in front of his face, clutching his shoulders again while writhing beneath him.
The brunette grabbed him by the nape of the neck, pulling him toward him to unite their mouths in a chaotic, desperate, and lascivious kiss, while he pulled his hair with his fingers tangled in his curls. And Ilya needed more and more and more. Now that he had him, that he was finally inside Shane, that he could finally taste the flavor of his mouth, he couldn't contain it. So he let go of his mouth, breaking the kiss and focused on penetrating him fully, unleashing all the repressed desire of years and years in strong, fast, and hard thrusts. And Shane did nothing but moan in screams and writhe beneath him, pulling his hair hard.
"Ilya, ah!" Shane shrieked when it seemed Ilya hit his G-spot. So, he fixed his movements at that angle. "Yes! Fuck... harder."
Ilya growled, sinking in with greater ferocity. The bed creaked beneath them, the headboard hit against the wall, and the sounds coming from their mouths were now completely inhuman. They looked like animals in heat.
"Come on, Ilya..." Shane pleaded between moans, looking at him with eyes glassy and drunk with desire, raising his hands to cradle his face with so much love, Ilya’s heart threatened to jump out of his chest. "I need you" he whispered again, contracting his internal walls around his member.
That confession broke him in half. Ilya had spent years suffocating what he felt, convincing himself to the core that life had already made it clear to him that Shane would never be his; rotting in silence so as not to lose his best friend. All the buried love, all the dawns wanting him in silence, all the times he swallowed his own feelings convinced that Shane would never correspond. Having him there, clinging to his body and begging for him, unearthed all that devotion with a violence that left him blind. There was no turning back.
With a dull roar, Ilya exploded, losing the last trace of sanity. He began to thrust into him, as if it were possible, even harder, losing rhythm in a wild urgency. Shane didn't even try to hide his screams anymore, and unhooked his legs from Ilya’s forearms to wrap them firmly around his hips, imprisoning him. Shane couldn't contain his moans and didn't make the attempt to hide them. The mattress and the whole bed vibrated with the force of his thrusts, and Shane felt so damn good, so goddamn tight and perfect around his penis, that Ilya’s eyes filled with tears.
"Fuck, Shane, I... I—" Ilya tried to articulate a sentence, but the words drowned in his throat. Everything was too much. Shane’s broken screams, sharp and heartbreaking, didn't sound like anything he had heard before through the room next door; these were real, they were his, and they pierced his senses, causing his member to spill pre-seminal fluid inside him.
"Ilya... Almost there..." Shane announced in a scream, his hips rotating uncontrollably on Ilya’s penis as if he had been born for it. Ilya growled, sliding a hand downward to catch Shane’s neglected member that lay between their bodies, beginning to masturbate him with a firm pulse. Shane screamed again from the surprise of the stimulation, shaking beneath him before pulling him again to slam his lips in another kiss.
He stifled a moan between their mouths and Shane finally came in his hand. And fuck, the image he had in front of him was like a powerful aphrodisiac: Shane with his semen spread across his abdomen and Ilya’s hand, while his arms and legs surrounded him, being penetrated by his penis that entered and exited unbridledly from the man he had loved since he could remember. And Ilya, with four more thrusts, also came, exiting Shane quickly and clumsily, spilling over his groin with a strong moan that would have been shameful if Shane wasn't just as shattered.