Chapter Text
In 2017, Ilya watches Scott Hunter win the MVP award. He sits in the audience and feels himself hollowing out with every word Hunter speaks about belonging, about finding a home in someone. When the audience laughs and claps and sighs, he laughs and claps and sighs. How brave, someone whispers at his table, and Ilya nods along. His face feels like it’s made of plaster, like it could come off in one piece if he pulled hard enough.
Somewhere in the audience, Shane Hollander is also clapping along. Ilya is pretending to not know exactly where he is, even though he saw him as soon as he walked in the room, and tracked him until he sat down at the Voyageurs’ table. Like always, Ilya feels the distance between them strung tight like a live wire. If he plucks it, will it sound the same alarm, deep in Shane’s body, and bring him to Ilya by the end of the night? Or will it go slack, with no one on the other side to hold onto it?
Ilya was the one who had ended it. He has to keep reminding himself, every time his phone pings and a bolt of adrenaline rockets through his chest, every time he opens his texts and automatically starts scrolling to the thread with Jane: You chose this. You broke the only precious thing you had, and now you have nothing. Just like you always knew you would; just like you wanted.
Even now, months later, the pain is bright and physical, deep in his ribcage, his gut. It’s worse with Hollander in the same fucking room. Even though Shane is righteously ignoring him to his face, Ilya can feel his eyes burning into the back of Ilya’s neck. He isn’t looking, but he’s sure Shane is cycling through emotions, and that each of them are being broadcast all over Shane’s beautiful face, if anyone cares to look, to decode.
Ilya wants to turn around and tackle him off his seat and pin him to the ground and fuck him. Or just hug him, maybe, and smell his hair. Or just be near him, maybe in the seat next to him, just close enough to be able to talk to him, see with his own eyes that he exists, that he didn’t just dream up Shane Hollander like a lonely child in a fairy tale.
This. This is exactly the kind of pathetic shit Ilya is not supposed to be thinking. It’s why he broke it off, of course; because Shane was asking him for something, and Ilya didn’t have it to give. He’d been in Russia, after his father’s stroke, and Shane had just kept… asking him how he was. Wanting to be there for him.
And really, what could Ilya have said? I choose Russia over you? I choose my family over you?
Or, more honest: I have to choose Russia over you. Because of my family.
Or, most honest, and so most impossible: I choose you. I don’t get a choice.
There is no world in which he gets to have Shane Hollander. Not in any way it matters. It isn’t even worth cataloguing the reasons why; it’s as inevitable, as inescapable as the heat that comes from friction.
It’s easier to pop the blister than to wait for it to happen on its own. It’s better to get the pain over and done with, while it still feels like you’re in control of it. It is, of course, better to never be in the position to feel pain in the first place—but if you were careless, and irresponsible, and you let an annoying Canadian hockey player somehow worm his way under your skin, into your dreams, into your blood—well. It’s still better to pop the bubble than to be caught unaware by its inevitable bursting.
After the ceremony’s over, and everyone has flooded into the hotel bar to start the real celebrations, Ilya drifts, and drinks. When he’s waved over by a teammate or a manager or a journalist, he goes. He glad-hands and compliments and chirps, like he’s expected to. He slaps backs and pumps hands and kisses cheeks.
Shane doesn’t look at him once.
When Ilya can’t take it anymore, he liberates a bottle of vodka from the open bar—he barely needs to flirt before the bartender is handing it over with a wink—and goes back to his room.
He thinks about texting Shane his room number. He thinks about drinking so much he never wakes up. He thinks about going back downstairs and flirting the bartender into the nearest bathroom and fucking him against the door.
He doesn’t do any of those things. He lays on his bed and stares at the ceiling, waiting to feel in control of the pain.
***
In 2018, the Bears win the cup for a second time, and Ilya wins MVP. He’s feeling good, manically good, as the room cheers him a second time at the hotel bar. Every face is turned towards him, every set of eyes on him, and for once he feels like he deserves it. He gave everything he had that season: worked through a sprained MCL in the preseason, gave up smoking for real, and even deigned to listen to the team nutritionist for once. On the ice, his whole body is a blade; sometimes he feels honed to such a fine point his edges are disappearing. He’s been playing the best hockey of his life.
He hasn’t texted Shane in 10 months. He’d had a moment of weakness in August, the night after he’d finished moving his father into a long-term care facility. He’d said goodbye to his father—bending over him to brush a kiss against his papery face—and Grigori had said blankly, “Have we met before?”
“No,” he’d said, “we haven’t.” Then he’d gone home and texted Shane, do you miss my cock inside you?
He’d wanted to ask if Shane missed him, full stop. It didn’t matter in the end; Shane had never replied.
But since then he’s been good. When he watches Shane score another should-be-impossible goal, or catches a glimpse one of Shane’s bizarre wet-t-shirt ads that Ilya can never escape, or takes the face-off against Montreal and has to actively leave his body in order to not look Shane in the eye and beg for forgiveness—when the hum inside him that goes Hollander Hollander Hollander gets louder, becomes more of a howl—he texts Svetlana. Or he goes to a club. Or, increasingly, to a bathhouse in Providence, where he knows he isn’t Ilya Rozanov, Boston’s star center, Russia’s prodigal son; he’s just a warm mouth, a willing cock. It’s not what he wants, but it makes not having it survivable.
But now he’s standing on a chair, and Shane Hollander is clapping for him. He has a bitchy, disgruntled look on his face, and his clapping is perfunctory, but when Ilya looks at him, he looks right back. His eyes are dark and big, and they reflect the low, warm light of the room when he looks at Ilya. Ilya wants to bite into him like an apple, right through to the core of him.
And so he isn’t surprised when, at the end of the night, he somehow finds himself alone with Shane in the hotel elevator. Shane doesn’t look at him as he gets on, but stands there scowling, his arms folded tightly against his chest.
Ilya presses the number to his floor. Shane doesn’t.
“What floor?” asks Ilya. He looks at Shane askance, out of the corners of his eyes, because looking at him directly is too much, too bright.
“Fuck you,” says Shane, with real feeling.
Ilya smiles.
They don’t speak after that. As soon as they’re safely inside Ilya’s room, Shane has him crowded up against the wall. It isn’t slow and tender, like the last time they fucked—has it already been over a year?—at his house in Boston, before everything went to shit. It’s desperate and rough and over too fast. They don’t even get all their clothes off; afterwards, Shane goes to the bathroom to clean up, and Ilya lays on the bed, slowly coming back to himself, his briefs still shoved halfway down his thighs, idly counting the buttons on his shirt that had been ripped away.
When Shane comes out of the bathroom—fully dressed, his hair back in order but his mouth still a telltale mess—he looks, for a second, like he wants to say something. Usually Shane gets fuck-dumb and boneless after sex, but his spine is already ramrod straight again, his shoulders around his ears. He presses his lips together in a thin line. Ilya braces for impact.
“You played great hockey this year,” Shane says finally, and he leaves the room without a backward glance.
Alone, the last warmth of his orgasm haze dissipating and the cold of self-hatred creeping back in, Ilya says to himself, You deserve this.This is what you worked for.
***
In 2019, neither Montreal nor Boston makes it past the second round of the playoffs. In Vegas, Ilya doesn’t bother with the hotel bar; he goes straight to his room and takes off his suit. He’s still in slacks when the knock on the door comes. This time Ilya’s prepared for it, for the shock of need and desperation, for the way time speeds up as soon as Shane’s clothes are off when all he wants is for it to slow down. He presses Shane against the hotel door, Shane face first against the wood, his forehead pressed against the map of emergency exits, Ilya flush against him, one hand braced against the door and the other hand snaking down to palm Shane’s dick.
“You came here because you’re desperate for it,” Ilya growls into Shane’s ear. “You need it, you need me to fuck you.”
“No,” says Shane, but he bucks against Ilya’s palm.
“Yes,” says Ilya. He felt lightheaded, high just from the smell of Shane, his seaweed shampoo, his cedar aftershave. “No one fucks you like I do. No one makes you come like I do.”
“No,” says Shane again, but he makes a high keening sound when Ilya takes his hand away.
It takes all of the willpower he’s mustered in his 28 years, but Ilya drops both his hands and steps back. Not far back. Far enough that he can register the cool air of the hotel room against his skin instead of Shane, Shane, Shane.
“If you tell me to stop, I will,” he says, and he hopes he doesn’t sound as wrecked as he feels.
For a moment Shane is silent. His shoulders heave as he regains control of his breathing, his palms flat against the door, bracing himself now that Ilya’s not there to hold his weight. Goosebumps sweep across the back of Shane’s neck and shoulders as the room’s air conditioner kicks on. Ilya doesn’t even remember getting Shane’s shirt off.
Shane doesn’t lift his head from the plastic sign. His shoulders rise and fall.
Ilya sways forward, just a centimeter. He can’t help it. He’s always been powerless against Shane’s gravity, never able to simply stay in orbit, always on track for the next catastrophic collision.
“Tell me to stop, Hollander,” he rasps, and now he knows he sounds as wrecked as he feels.
Finally, Shane’s shoulders drop. “No,” he says a third time, and something ugly in Ilya, the loneliest, angriest part of him, roars in triumph at the defeat in Shane’s posture, the tremor in Shane’s voice. “Don’t stop.”
Ilya is on him before he’s finished getting the words out. He trails hot, messy kisses up the crook of Shane’s neck, covering one of Shane’s hands on the door with his own as he springs Shane’s always-ridiculously-hard cock out of his boxer-briefs and starts to stroke him with the other.
“Don’t worry, don’t worry, Hollander,” Ilya babbles, as always unable to control his mouth and his body at the same time. “I’ve got you, I’m going to give you what you want. I’ll give you what you came here for.”
“Augh,” says Shane, letting go a little more, letting Ilya take his weight. He tips his head back and rests it on Ilya’s shoulder, eyes closed.
“No one else can fuck you like this, Hollander,” Ilya said, and he pushes his hard-on, still trapped in his slacks, against the cleft of Shane’s ass.
He takes his hand away—Shane keens again, a sound Ilya knows he’ll dream about for the rest of his life—and grips Shane’s jaw, his palm against Shane’s lips. “Lick it,” he said, “get it wet,” and he had forgotten—how could he have forgotten?—how obedient Shane is, how eager to follow instructions. Shane laves Ilya’s palm with his tongue, sucks his thumb and then his fingers into his mouth, laps his tongue all the way to the skin between each finger.
“Fuck,” Ilya says, finally ripping his hand away and returning it to Shane’s dick, which is starting to leak precome. “You’re so fucking hot, you’re unbelievable, you’re—”
“Rozanov,” Shane interrupts, “Shut the fuck up and fuck me. I’m not going to—I can’t—”
“Shh,” Ilya soothes, but he doesn’t slow his hand. “I’ve got you, Hollander, I’ve got you. It’s okay, you can come. Come on.”
Shane begins to protest, but Ilya tightens his grip. Just a little. “You can come,” he continues, “because you’re going to come twice tonight.”
“Big—big promises,” Shane gasps, but he’s squeezing his eyes shut.
Ilya ignores him. “First you come in my mouth,” he says, holding Shane still even as he begins to push restlessly, mindlessly back against him. “Then I eat you out until you cry and beg me to fuck you. Then you come again, on my cock.”
“Oh,” says Shane weakly, going limp. “Okay.”
“You think you can do this, Hollander?” Ilya scrapes his teeth along the juncture of Shane’s collarbone and shoulder. “You think you can be good for me? This is what you wanted, yes?” He lets go of Shane’s hand—he hadn’t realized how tightly he’d been gripping it, or how maybe how tightly Shane had been gripping him—and turns Shane around to face him.
“I—yes,” says Shane, “Fuck—just—”
Ilya is already dropping to his knees. He would love to take his time, see what other noises he can pull out of Shane, but he’s clinging to the shreds of his own self-control as it is. It is literally all he can do to open his mouth and swallow Shane down, hands on his hips to hold him still against the wood.
“Ahhh,” sighs Shane, and Ilya wants to swallow that down too. Shane’s fingers rake through Ilya’s hair, flexing and unflexing unconsciously.
Ilya relaxes his throat, slides forward until his nose brushes Shane’s pubes and Shane’s dick bumps the back of his throat. He closes his eyes, savoring the feeling, the stretch in his jaw, the little waves that roll over Shane’s body as he fights to stay still, to be good.
“Look at me,” Shane gasps, clumsily pawing at his face, “Look at me, Ilya.”
Ilya turns his eyes upwards, looks up at Shane through his eyelashes, and Shane comes down his throat, staring back at him.
Later, his hair wet from the shower, Shane sits on the edge of the bed to tie his shoes. Ilya, wrapped in a towel, reclines against the headboard, watches the familiar curve of his spine. This time, he knows Shane won’t tell him he’d played great hockey; he hasn’t. Something had happened over the summer, when he was in Russia, sleeping on his brother’s couch most nights because Alexei was fuck knows where and his wife was on bed rest for her third trimester, playing cards with his father who only recognized him to insult him. He had flown to Moscow, the morning after the NHL awards, feeling knife-sharp and honed to a point; he returned to Boston ground down to the hilt, with a permanent ache in his right hip from Alexei’s horrible couch. He’d played shitty hockey all year, and he can only hope Shane will be kind enough to not mention it—or worse, pity him.
Instead, Shane, still facing away from him, says, “I don’t know why I keep doing this. It makes me feel like shit.”
Ilya’s stomach clenches; a dull ache runs from the core of his ribcage, down his arms, through his hands. He wants to say, I only ever want you to feel good. I would do anything to make you feel good.
He wants to say, You shouldn’t come back. This is it, this is all I can give you: orgasms and feeling like shit about yourself. The Ilya Rozanov experience.
He wants to say, Whenever you knock, I’ll open the door. Whenever you want me, I’ll let you in, I’ll say yes. Even if it kills us both.
He doesn’t say anything. His tongue is thick in his mouth and he can’t trust his English and he doesn’t know what he could say that won’t make things worse.
Finished tying his shoes, and seemingly not expecting a response, Shane gets to his feet. At the door he pauses, looking back at Ilya, that shy, almost-smile that Ilya could draw from memory on his face. If Ilya had a heart, it would ache with how beautiful Shane always is, especially when he’s walking out the door.
“See you next year?” Shane asks, mostly succeeding at not sounding hopeful.
Ilya closes his eyes. It’s his lot in life to let Shane Hollander go, over and over. That’s the price of getting to have him at all. Even if just for one night, Ilya is willing to pay it.
“We’ll see, Hollander,” he says. He doesn’t open his eyes until he hears the click of the door as Shane pulls it shut behind him.
***
In 2020, Ilya’s father finally dies.
It’s during playoffs, which doesn’t matter, because the Bears didn’t even get a wild card slot. Ilya makes it to his father’s bedside before his death, not that that matters either; one look at his father tells him that Grigori Rozanov left the planet long ago.
He pays for the funeral. He pays for his father’s wife (he will not call her his step-mother), enough to set her up for life if she’s not an idiot. He pays for his brother’s mistress’s new condo, just to get Alexei to shut the fuck up. He doesn’t care; he’ll pay what he needs to get the fuck out of there. To never have to talk to these people again.
He flies straight to Las Vegas from Moscow. He’s presenting the Lady Byng award again, though thankfully not with Hollander this time—although, as soon as he lands and has his schedule shoved in his hand by a hyperventilating PA, he sees that Hollander was presenting an award as well.
Sometimes, he wonders if he’s actually already dead, condemned to repeat the same story over and over again, without ever being able to change the outcome.
So, of course, he lets his shoulder brush against Shane’s as he walks past him on the way to the stage.
And, of course, after he’s done presenting, he goes straight to the little out-of-the-way bathroom, the same one he followed Shane into all those years ago.
And, of course, Shane is there. Waiting for him.
Shane doesn’t let him speak. He grips Ilya’s lapels and propels him back towards the sink. Shane has always kissed like he was drowning—it was one of Ilya’s first favorite things about him—and his mouth is hot and needy on Ilya’s own. Even for Shane, though, there is something grasping about the way he’s kissing Ilya, something unfamiliar and desperate.
Shane trails his mouth away from Ilya’s, down his jaw, along his neck. His hands fumble at Ilya’s belt.
“This doesn’t mean anything,” he says, as he sucks at Ilya’s pulse point.
Ilya fights to focus, to come back to himself enough to give Shane what he’s asking for, even though he doesn’t know what it is.
“This doesn’t mean anything,” Shane says again. He’s finally gotten Ilya’s belt undone and he’s biting and sucking at Ilya’s collarbone.
Ilya tilts his head to give Shane better access. His hands come up of their own accord, smoothing Shane’s suit jacket, skimming underneath his collar. “This doesn’t mean anything,” he hears himself agree.
Shane’s hand is on his dick and his mouth is on the spot just beneath his earlobe. Ilya hopes he remembered to lock the door.
“I don’t mean anything to you,” Shane whispers, now using his other hand to shove Ilya’s shirt up, enough to dig his fingers into Ilya’s abs and ribs. “I’m nothing to you, I’m nothing.”
Ilya wants to protest, but Shane is circling his nipple with his thumb, pinching it lightly between his fingers, scraping the blunt edge of his thumbnail over the sensitive skin. He groans instead, unable to form words, too lost in the feeling of Shane’s hands on him.
“Say it,” Shane insists. He bends and closes his teeth around the same nipple he’d just been pinching. He tightens his grip on Ilya’s dick, adds a twist of his wrist. “I mean nothing to you, this is nothing.”
“I—Hollander, fuck,” Ilya says instead. He wants to say it. He wants to give Shane what he’s asking for. He doesn’t know why he can’t, except that it isn’t true. More than that, he doesn’t want to hurt Shane. Even when he’s asking to be hurt.
“Say it,” says Shane again, and he goes to his knees.
On this dirty bathroom floor, said Shane’s ghost, almost a decade ago. Please.
“You’re nothing to me,” Ilya says, but he cups Shane’s face as he says it, strokes his cheek and jaw with his thumb like he could smooth away the sting of it. “This is nothing.”
“Yes,” says Shane, “Please fuck my mouth.”
Ilya is only a man. A man with poor self-control at the best of times, sure, but he defies anyone with a dick who’s remotely inclined towards the masculine form to resist Shane Hollander, on his knees, opening his mouth, asking to be used.
It’s over too fast. It’s always over too fast. When Ilya reaches for him, planning to return the favor—this time without any bitching about the bathroom floor—Shane pulls away, reaching into his slacks to adjust his obvious erection, refusing to meet Ilya’s eyes.
Ilya lets his hands drop, remains leaning against the sink, panting, trying to reorient himself to the world. Shane takes two large, pointed steps away from him, then looks into the mirror to begin fixing his face and his hair. His cheeks are flushed, his mouth is red with obvious beard-burn from Ilya’s stubble, and his eyelashes are wet. He frowns at himself and bent to splash some water on his face.
He is so breathtaking when he’s messy, when he allows Ilya to make him messy, to drag him over the edge of his own desire. Ilya wants to tell him so. He isn’t sure he knows how to, in English, or maybe even in Russian.
“I’m seeing someone,” Shane says. He is washing his hands and still not looking at Ilya.
Silence. Ilya, belatedly, tucks his soft dick back into his pants. His skin is a little tacky still, Shane’s saliva not yet dry.
“A man,” Shane says, though Ilya hasn’t said anything. “I’m seeing a man. He’s—good. He’s good to me.”
“Oh,” says Ilya distantly. He is concentrating on doing up his fly and not throwing up. “That’s good.”
Now Shane is drying his hands with a paper towel. He’s somehow managed to put his hair back in some kind of order and the flush has receded from his cheeks and mouth. He looks almost normal. Like Ilya never touched him at all.
There’s a roaring in Ilya’s ears. Or maybe it’s his brother, at their mother’s funeral, whispering in his ear: I guess she didn’t love even you enough to stay around, golden boy. Or maybe it’s his father, the last time he’d been lucid enough to know who he was talking to: Thank God your mother isn’t alive to see you now.
“Yeah,” Shane continues, because he’s still talking for some reason, still looking vaguely over Ilya’s shoulder rather than directly at him. “So, I mean, I think we can’t—I mean I think this shouldn’t happen again. He’s a good guy and I think he wants—I think he’s serious about me.” He pauses again and for a moment he looks at Ilya, really looks at him. There’s something searching in his eyes, like he’s waiting for Ilya to say something.
“Okay,” says Ilya, because what else is there to say? They’re nothing. This is nothing; that’s what Shane was trying to tell him. Ilya can feel darkness pulling at him like a tide, with a touch as soft and welcoming as his mother’s. His father is dead, and this is nothing, has always been nothing, and what, otherwise, tethers him to the shore?
“Okay,” says Shane, nodding to himself, back to looking over Ilya’s shoulder. He looks for a second like he’s going to hold his hand out for Ilya to shake. Instead he turns for the door. “Well, bye, I guess.”
“Goodbye, Hollander,” says Ilya. Then he lets the tide take him.