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Near the end of their two weeks, Shane turns to him in the blue-grey light of the evening, when they’ve just come in from the fire pit outside and neither has bothered to turn on the lights yet. Ilya can see stars in the sky beyond, dotting the lake with their reflections. He realizes that it has been a long time since he was anywhere with enough darkness for that.
And it is here that Shane looks at him with a serious glint in his big, brown eyes and says, “I’ve been wondering. If, um, if it had been your father who caught us instead of mine. What do you think…”
Ilya may have agreed to honesty, but there are some topics that reek too much of all the things he cannot bear to bring into this place, this relaxation, as Shane calls it. Where Ilya wakes up with his love on his shoulder each morning, and spends each day mapping the complexities of Shane’s whole body: the curve of his hips, the dimple in his back, the jut of cheekbone under freckles. Ilya’s father has no place here, so he turns instead and crowds Shane back against the counter, bracketing him with a hand on either side so he cannot turn away.
“I don’t bring up your father when I’m about to fuck you, Hollander.”
Shane rolls his eyes at that, successfully diverted.
“Yeah, maybe a bit too soon, huh?”
But when his arms sneak up around Ilya’s neck they are softer than expected, like Shane is holding him steady just as much as he is leaning up to lick his way across Ilya’s tongue. Like he’s keeping Ilya safe, just by being there.
***
When he is fourteen years old, Ilya misses a goal.
His team is down 3-1, already five minutes into the third period, and they’re playing like shit. Ilya knows it. The opposing team’s goaltender knows it. His coach sure as hell knows it too.
Ilya also knows that they’re fucking exhausted.
It’s a hard game at the end of a hard season. Their left wing is still in the penalty box from the end of the last period, and his replacement is a piece of shit new kid who wouldn’t be allowed in the locker room with the team, nevermind out on the ice, if Ilya had anything to say about it.
Ilya has quite a lot to say about it, actually. He has a lot to say about everything. So much that he screams himself hoarse, sometimes, and pounds against anything he can reach with both of his fists until his knuckles are cracked and swollen, and still, no one seems to listen. It used to frustrate him to no end, the way things just kept being decided somewhere else, somewhere up above his head, higher than his pay grade, keep your head down, Ilya, and be quiet, where he wasn’t supposed to notice them.
The left wing, for example: he’d been checked into the boards no less than five times this game by the opposing defender, and Ilya hadn’t heard everything the guy said to him, but enough to know that it was something about the wing’s sister and getting her into the defender’s bed later that night, and Ilya couldn’t really blame his teammate for much, once the punches started swinging.
But they’re still down a player, basically, and Ilya is blinking sweat out of his eyes as he maneuvers around the new wing, who doesn’t seem to have any fucking instincts to speak of, in hockey or otherwise. He lacks even the basic awareness that another human body is hurling by at top speed - because, yes, Ilya is fast - or that this human is currently in possession of a 150 centimeter stick, and isn’t above a dose of accidental slashing, if the game continues like this for much longer.
It doesn’t come to that though, because eventually, the defense parts enough that Ilya sees a line for a shot, and he takes it.
He misses.
The game ends. They lose. The other team jeers. Blah blah blah.
When he is fourteen years old, Ilya’s coach storms into the locker room and starts shouting. They all do their best to ignore it, to look suitably chastised and angry and unimpressed at each other. At least, Ilya assumes they do because he keeps his own eyes trained on each of his shoulder pads as he shrugs them off with rough, methodical motions, dropping them to the bench one after the other.
It’s not until there’s a loud clang behind him that Ilya jerks around, in instinct, more than anything else, just in time to see a skate drop to the floor.
The wing who’d defended his sister is pressed up against the lockers with one hand clapped to his cheek, an unmistakable trail of red blooming between his fingers.
Their coach turns, then; catches Ilya staring. His eyes are blank, with disappointment or anger, or possibly something closer to embarrassment, Ilya doesn’t know.
He looks away. He pretends not to see the way the wing’s shoulders are shaking, because no matter what people say about him, Ilya at least has enough decency to let a boy deal with his own failure in peace.
***
When he is sixteen years old, Ilya sucks off a man for the first time. And he’s pretty fucking good at it, if the noises Sasha makes as he comes are anything to go by.
Though, privately, Ilya’s pretty sure that it wouldn’t take much to please Sasha, who walks around with the bravado of a rich boy’s only son, like someone who hit a growth spurt far too late and is doing his best to overcompensate for the years spent thinking he was too small for the rest of them.
Maybe he’s also overcompensating for the fact that he cornered Ilya in the back corner of the toilets and by the time Ilya had pushed him against the wall and kissed him, his dick was already a hard line of arousal pressed into Ilya’s thigh.
When he is seventeen years old, Ilya sucks off a man for the third time, and the fourth. And that man sucks him back in return, and Ilya fumbles his way through the act of throwing him down on an old lumpy mattress and fucking him. It is different than with girls, but not different at the same time; not in any way that matters.
Sasha claims to like all of it the same, and Ilya he probably does too, when he lets himself think it through. At the very least, he likes the thrill of it: the rule-breaking, heart in his throat, adrenaline in his veins, don’t you dare scream like that again, Sasha I swear to god I will gag you parts of it. Those parts suit Ilya just fine.
In the end, the issue isn’t with Sasha at all, or with his dick, or anything else besides his annoying veneer of superiority. The problem, of course, is that Ilya keeps going back to him.
It’s that Ilya is always playing hockey, and Sasha is always fucking there, in the upper rows at games, or loitering around the offices after practice.
Sasha is there and Ilya is horny and the arrangement works well enough, for a while.
It works until one day, Sasha grabs Ilya’s face to pull him down for a kiss and Ilya can’t hold back a wince as fingers dig into the day-old bruise along the base of his jaw. Sasha feels it, pulls back with a little frown creasing his eyebrows.
“What - Oh,” he says, even as Ilya tries to tilt away. “What happened?”
Ilya shrugs. “Just a fight. Someone elbowed me in the scrum one too many times.”
And he goes to lean in again, aiming to lick a line of sense back into Sasha’s mouth, but before Ilya can get there, he speaks up again:
“You didn’t, though.”
“Didn’t what?”
“Get into a fight.”
Ilya’s not even hard anymore.
“Christ, Sasha, what does it matter?”
Sasha glances away, and then back again, uncomfortable - and good, he fucking should be.
“It doesn’t,” he says, finally. “It’s just that I saw the game, you know? You didn’t fight anyone. For once.”
Ilya doesn’t even bother smiling at the last bit, just rolls his eyes.
Sasha might not be smart, but he’s not dumb, either, and he knows how the world works as well as anyone. He knows what it’s like to be a boy in a life where other people make the rules. Ilya knows that he knows; Sasha’s own father is Ilya’s fucking coach. He has seats right on the glass for that one.
So, Ilya tosses the away remains of the conversation like the useless thing it is, in favour of leaning back into Sasha’s space to ask,
“Are we going to fuck or not?”
***
Tiger Williams holds the NHL record for the most career penalty minutes: 3,971, which adds up to just over three days in total. Ilya is not going to beat that, no matter how dirty he plays.
It feels like a bit of a let down, sometimes, like he can’t even be the best at the one thing everyone tells him he’s good for: being an asshole. Someone else set that record twenty years ago.
Ilya doesn’t mind the penalty box, though. As annoying as it is to be benched at the high of a game, the box has become routine in a way that Ilya will never quite admit to himself is comforting. Slashing, interference, checking from behind, Ilya does it all when he needs to, and he knows exactly what to expect as a consequence.
He’ll throw his gloves down and go for anyone who wants, when things get to it. Ilya is more than happy to be the one with that reputation, to draw the heat for whatever it was he’s said in the face off, or the locker room, or the parking lot.
His teammates can be whoever they are on the ice, and Ilya can keep on being this. A second-rate Williams, as mediocre - as lazy - as the rest of them.
***
When Ilya is ten years old, his brother Alexei breaks a cabinet.
It’s not malicious, Ilya doesn’t think. Alexei is just doing whatever it is he does most days: playing, shouting, banging around the house like he’s going to own it some day, a fact he’s never shy to remind Ilya of, when he gets under Alexei’s feet one too many times an hour.
Ilya hears it happen from the kitchen, where he’s perched on a chair watching his mom chop vegetables with slow, methodical motions. It’s how she does a lot of things: carefully, with a level of intention that might have been calm on someone else but on her it mostly just seemed tired. And sometimes it was something else entirely that Ilya couldn’t place.
They both look up when they hear the shattering of glass, Ilya to his mom and her to the open door. In her hand the knife has gone still. For a moment, they sit, frozen into a single, solid entity, before Alexei’s voice calls out and his mother rushes into the next room, vegetables forgotten.
“Ilya is ten years old,” Alexei tells their father, when he gets home that night.
He was just playing like ten year olds do; it was an accident, he’s certain, because Ilya would never do something like that on purpose, would he? Alexei’s eyes lock into Ilya’s, dark and daring him to speak up.
It’s a weigh up of two consequences, his dad would deal with him tonight or Alexei would make his life hell for weeks. Neither particularly appealing, but before Ilya can align himself one way or the other, someone else steps forward.
His mom, who spent the afternoon on her knees picking glass out of the carpet, whose hands do not shake as she pushes her hair behind one ear and moves between them.
And this, Ilya knows, is the worst of the consequences.
This is, “You are always protecting him! He doesn’t need to be coddled with your fucking lies!”
And, “It’s not a lie, Grigori, I was right there with him -”
This is Alexei shrinking back against the wall and rising voices and the certainty that next time, Ilya will jump for the blame the moment it is offered.
***
The thing about hockey is that refs have near complete discretion when it comes to calling fights, especially regarding instigators. And the thing about Ilya is that he has a reputation that’s impossible to overlook.
When two people end up on the ground and one of them is Ilya Rozanov, it’s never a stretch to point fingers his direction, once the culprits have been pulled apart.
So, he’s not surprised to hear his name on the ref’s lips, or the general muttering from the crowd, as he’s pulled up by the back of his jersey. Ilya knows what’s expected of him, so he flips the guy off as he skates away, which provokes another round of shouting.
Ilya’s barely paying attention anymore, just scooping his helmet off the ground and looking around for his second glove, but a couple of voices stand out from the clamour.
“Hold on, you’ve got it wrong.”
“Hollander! What are you doing?”
“It wasn’t him!”
What the hell is he on about? Ilya was right there on the ground with the rest of them.
“Rozanov didn’t start it!”
And Ilya isn’t sure what to do with that, so he skates all the way to the penalty box anyway, trying to look pissed off instead of what he really feels, which is a bone-deep, maddening confusion.
***
When he is twelve years old, Ilya’s father tells him to keep a secret.
By then, he knows better than to go against his father’s word, especially when it comes on a particularly serious tone. It’s not the one he uses to bark orders to his men, out at work, or when he snaps at his sons to fall in line at home, or any other measures of an aging man’s displeasure. This is a quiet pitch Ilya has rarely ever heard: powerful in a way that does not need to flaunt itself. It is not the snap of a belt or the thud of skin on skin, or a raised voice on the other side of a too-thin wall. This is something else entirely.
So, Ilya nods. He swallows back the memory of vacant eyes, and he gets down on his knees to reach beneath the bed for an empty bottle. The hand hanging down beside him is still splayed, fingers stretched as if they too are reaching out for something empty.
***
When Ilya is twenty five years old, Shane Hollander walks out of his house after eating a tuna melt. And in that moment, Ilya knows that if there was an Olympic medal for fucking up his own life, he would have brought home gold three times over.
Cum is drying, tacky on his stomach, and in the waistband of his sweatpants, his or Shane’s he doesn’t know. They’ve joined into a single horrible mess by now, and it is a long, long time before Ilya can bring himself to stand and clean it up.
***
When he is twenty six years old, Ilya tells his secret for the first time.
His cheek is pressed against Shane’s leg and he’s staring down a burning pile of logs because he can’t bring himself to look anywhere less immediate.
Shane does none of the things that Ilya has always worried Canadians might, in the face of something horrible. He doesn’t exclaim and he doesn’t cry and he doesn’t fucking apologize, which seems to be the baseline of all communication in this ridiculous country. He just strokes his fingers through Ilya’s hair like he is something gentle, and asks questions: serious, and somber, but nothing more.
Ilya tells his secret and the world does not end.
Shane does not look at him with pity or disgust. His father’s ghost does not appear in a fury of hellfire to vent displeasure.
In fact, nothing much happens at all. Shane stays there, his big hand rubbing soothing patterns into Ilya’s shoulder, down his side to the curve of his waist and back up again, until long after the sun has set.
***
The problem is that once the truth is out, it becomes impossible to shut it away again. Ilya sees her everywhere, in the golden glint of a sunrise, or the soft touch of Shane’s hand on his shoulder, he sees her in the way Shane smiles with only the corners of his eyes when he’s trying his hardest not to laugh.
He sees her a little bit too, in the way Shane freezes when his dad spots them through the window. And this time, Ilya is ready. He will not collapse under the pressure of being while someone he loves takes on blame that Ilya might shoulder; he can face up to an angry father as easy as breathing if he needs to.
But he doesn’t, in the end.
In the end, there’s no blame for anyone - except maybe Shane should have answered his phone that morning, but Ilya hasn’t checked his since last night so he really can’t be pointing fingers.
Ilya sees Irena Rozenov in the quiet unfolding of something beautiful, in the way Shane curls into him on the couch at night, or hands him coffee without being asked each morning.
He sees her at night, sometimes, when he closes his eyes. A splayed hand and a horrible emptiness, a shattering glass and the soft swell of tears that Ilya wasn’t meant to hear.
When he sees her like this, in the darkness, he tries to run. He is stronger now, and fast enough to put himself in front of any number of threats, out on the ice - he would throw himself between Shane and a so-called loon if he had to.
When he is twenty six years old, Ilya wakes with the gold chain around his neck so heavy that he can barely lift his head.
He doesn’t go out to the lake, this time. Instead, he curls himself into a corner of Shane’s couch, with its adequate number of throw pillows, and stares vaguely at the small dot of light across the water, the barest hint of sunrise. Ilya stares at it until his eyes blur and his chest stutters and the shadows in the lake’s ripples lengthen into fingers.
Then, he buries his face in the cushions.
It’s a constant back and forth of looking and not looking, of seeing and wishing he wasn’t.
He is in one of those cycles now, with a pillow pressed against his eyes and a pulse like a headache at his temples when he hears the soft pad of foodsteps on the hardwood floor.
Shane’s voice, groggy with sleep: “Are you okay?”
And Ilya says, “Yes.”
And then he thinks about let’s just be honest with each other about what we think. And maybe how we really feel. He thinks about Shane holding him like he was something precious, lips against his forehead, fingers tangled in the sweaty curls at the base of his neck. He thinks about I love you too. He lifts his head from the cushion, tips it back against the couch, and amends,
“No.”
The response is immediate: “What is it?”
Shane sits beside him, hesitant in a way Ilya hates. He wants to reach out but first he has to say,
“When I told you about her - about my mom. I think it broke something. Inside of me. I do not know how to fix it again.”
When he looks over, Shane is frowning and Ilya feels, if it were possible, worse because no one should ever be allowed to make Shane look that way first thing in the morning, not when he should be sleep rumpled with his hair askew and a dark bruise on his collarbone. Ilya put it there. And the one on his thigh and the one on his neck and the one on -
“Fix you?” Shane takes his hand now, reaching out like maybe he feels the pull between them just as strongly. Like a tide or a magnet or a puck and the net when Ilya Rozanov shoots for it.
“I have not thought about her in…I don’t know. A long time. And now I cannot seem to stop.”
“I’m sorry. If I pushed you into telling me. You didn’t have to -”
“No!” Ilya pulls Shane’s hand until he can tug him closer, and he goes with only the slightest friction, tucking himself against Ilya’s shoulder. “It is not about you.” The echo of an argument, years past. He wonders if Shane remembers the words as well as he does. He wonders if Shane regrets them. He tries to soften. “I do not regret telling you anything. It is just that…I cannot stop. Thinking. I should have been better.”
“What are you talking about?”
“For her. Like, maybe I could have protected her.”
“You were a child.”
“Yes.”
They're quiet for a long time, after that. He can’t reach the cushions, so the next time the reaching fingers lengthen behind his eyes, he buries his face in Shane’s hair instead, breathes in the scent of him. The feeling of being encased on all sides with softness.
He feels Shane’s fingers on his chest, stroking, exploring, tracing little patterns of comfort that sometime in the past week, Ilya has come to find familiar.
When Ilya is twenty six years old, the sun starts to rise.