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Ilya could have been a Grandmaster.
Not in the same way as: he could have been a cosmonaut. (Although he probably could have been that, too.)
In the same way as: he could have been a world champion hockey player.
When Ilya was two, his mother gifted him a chess set. “Лошадь! Лошадь!” he cried out when he pulled the black knight from the red velvet-lined box, and then again with the white.
His memory of this is not his own. He inherited it from his mother—like the chess set, like the mole in the hollow of his left cheek.
Like other things, too.
"Hey, what's this?" Shane calls from the bedroom. He'd left to get a hoodie from Ilya's closet while Ilya cooked them both breakfast.
"What is what, Hollander?" Ilya plates their food: eggs and bacon for himself; egg whites with turkey bacon for Shane. "I don't have x-ray vision. I am not Superman. Only have body like him."
When Shane pads into the kitchen, it's cozied up in Ilya's team hoodie and a pair of drop-crotch lounge pants from his dresser. Ilya's cock twitches to the chant of mine, mine, mine.
Shane knows exactly what he's doing. And he knows Ilya knows, too. Like most things Shane excels at, the effectiveness of his seduction lies in its precision more than its subtlety.
Distracted, Ilya takes a second to realize Shane's holding something in his hands. A wooden box, corners chipped, varnish faded.
"I didn't know you played chess."
Ilya's stomach drops.
Irina could have been a Grandmaster.
Not in the same way as: she could have been a Major's wife, a mother, a person of affluence but never influence. (Though she had been all these things, anyway.)
In the same way as: she could have been a doctor, or a scientist, or a professor, if only she'd been afforded the opportunity.
When, at three, Ilya began demonstrating an aptitude for strategy, Irina started teaching him the rules and theory of chess.
Ilya's mother was his first coach.
He didn't realize it until much later.
It had always felt like play.
"Hollander, you always go sneaking around in other people's closets?" Ilya tries to sound casual. He looks at Shane just long enough to see the concern contort his features.
The slide of the plate along the marbled countertop sounds like thunder. Maybe it's in his head.
"I wasn't—Ilya, I'm sorry. I didn't realize…" he trails off, gives Ilya a look that says both I love you and Help me out here.
God, he is so beautiful. And earnest. And careful.
Not ‘tiptoeing around Ilya's feelings because he thinks he can't handle the truth’ kind of careful. More like ‘massaging the surrounding skin to prevent the scar tissue from hardening while avoiding the wound’ kind of careful.
"Da. I used to play. My mother taught me." He shrugs as he says it.
Inside Ilya's mother there were two knights.
One championed darkness, the other defended light.
It used to be the battles were well-matched. Until they weren't.
It used to be Ilya didn't worry that he was like his mother. Until he did.
"Eat," Ilya says, gesturing to Shane's plate. It's an impression of real food. Not quite eggs, not quite bacon.
Ilya likes to tease Shane about his weird food, but really he's just happy Shane feels comfortable enough to ask for what he wants.
A tuna melt would never fly these days.
Shane doesn't pick up his fork. "Are you any good?" he asks, tentatively. The smile he offers is fond with a hint of goading. It's Ilya's favourite smile of Shane's.
"Da. I am good."
"Show me."
"Eat—and then I will show you."
When Irina died, Ilya's father erased her.
First went her things. Her favourite books. Her hairbrush. The wooden trinket box atop her vanity. It's where she kept her everyday jewellery—and a folded-up drawing Ilya had done of a mama bear and her cub sleeping curled up together.
Then went the pictures. The posed ones. The candid ones.
Nothing was sacred. Nothing was spared.
When Ilya breached the surface of his own suffocating grief long enough to realize what Grigori was doing, he didn't shout, didn't confront him. He went around the back of the house and rummaged through the trash. All he had to show for it were a few bent photos.
And the picture he'd drawn for her.
It would have to be enough.
After they finish eating, Ilya cleans up while Shane checks his emails.
"We got another sponsor for next summer's camps," Shane says, not looking up from his laptop. He's wearing his glasses. The ones with the weak-ass prescription that Ilya's pretty sure he only wears because they make him want to fuck Shane senseless the second he puts them on.
"I don't care," Ilya says, slotting the last plate into the dishwasher rack and closing it. He crosses the kitchen to where Shane is sitting.
"You're such an asshole," Shane says with too much affection for it to be anything but a pet name by this point.
"And you are boring," Ilya responds in exactly the same way.
Since Shane still hasn't looked away from his laptop, and since Ilya knows it's intentional, he threads his fingers through Shane's hair, tugs at it such that he has to tip his head up to lock eyes with Ilya.
He looks like Clark Kent in those glasses, and Ilya thinks, maybe Shane is the one with x-ray vision.
"Get on your knees," Ilya commands.
Shane hesitates for a second.
"I thought you were going to show me how good you are at chess?"
"Knees—and then I will show you." Ilya smirks. "I want to watch Superman suck my cock."
"You will not play games anymore."
That's what Grigori said to Ilya when he found him playing chess alone one Sunday afternoon. It was the off-season, and even still Ilya had been spending hours in the gym every day.
"Father," Ilya said, "is hockey not a game?"
Grigori scoffed, narrowing his eyes first at Ilya and then at the chess set.
It was a warning, and Ilya heeded it. Without emotion he picked up the pieces in handfuls. The weighted wooden bottoms of them clacked together as they fell into the box. He would only hear the sound of pucks dropping from then on.
You will not play games anymore. He wondered if his father said the same thing to his mother when he married her.
He imagined the play leaking from her body like a sigh, like a last breath.
It shouldn't have been a surprise when something sinister took its place.
Ilya pulls out right before he's about to come, finishes messily on Shane's face, onto Shane's outstretched tongue.
The glasses shield Shane's eyes from the worst of it.
Ilya pulls his t-shirt up and over his head, carefully cleans the come from Shane's perfectly freckled cheeks, his chin.
He removes Shane's glasses next, then wipes them with an unsoiled swatch of material before placing them on the table.
Shane is still on his knees through all of this, and Ilya helps him up, kissing him as soon as he's upright.
Not for the first time, Shane tastes like turkey bacon and come. He's moaning into Ilya's mouth, practically panting after sucking Ilya off. Ilya loves his mouth; Shane loves his cock.
"We are good match," Ilya says as he hoists Shane by the ass at the same time Shane wraps his legs around Ilya's waist.
"Sure, fuck, whatever you say, Rozanov."
Ilya loves the way they slip back into last names as easily as first names nowadays.
He carries Shane to the bedroom, lays him down on the bed. Shane stares at Ilya with laser-like intensity as Ilya strips him down then removes his own remaining clothing.
Shane's whole body is flushed crimson. It reminds Ilya of the velvet-lined box.
"Ilya," Shane says, not soberly, but not as lust-drunk as he had been just seconds ago.
"Turn over, Hollander." Ilya doesn't acknowledge the very deliberate first name.
The downside of being so in-sync with Shane is his uncanny ability to clock the barely perceptible cracks in Ilya's composure.
"I thought—"
"Turn over—and then I will show you."
Shane turns over.
Well, there is an upside, too.
Ilya brought very little of his old life to Boston when he was drafted. Some clothes, a few books. He wouldn't need much, after all. He had money now. People who could help him find housing and other things he needed.
The idea of leaving the chess set, however, made him ill.
What if his brother went through his room while he was gone? What if his father? There was no way he could trust him not to dispose of it. Out of spite. Out grief. Out of some secret third thing he hadn't quite puzzled out but which turned out to be dementia.
Ilya wrapped the wooden board and box carefully in a large, plush towel—Polina's favourite—then tucked it into the cushiony centre of his suitcase.
When he arrived in his temporary Boston apartment, he put the chess set in the back of his closet. And when he moved into the house, he did the same thing. Then again when he moved to Ottawa. He figured, he'd just do that until he died.
But then Shane Hollander showed up and blew the lid off all two of his closet-secrets.
Shane comes ass up, face down with Ilya's tongue in his hole, Ilya's hand stroking his cock.
He hasn't spoken real words in several minutes, just punched out syllables and needy, slutty little whines and whimpers.
Still, Ilya should be less surprised when, after he turns onto his back, the first nearly-sentence out of his mouth is, "Chess, now."
Shane doesn't know how to let anything go. It's as fucking annoying as it is hot.
"You shower—and then I—"
"Rozanov, I swear to god."
"Okay, okay! Is just—I did come all over your pretty face."
Shane rubs his eyes, but his smile betrays his exasperation. "Here's what's going to happen. I'm gonna shower, and when I come out, you better have that that board set up."
"Okay, Superman," Ilya says, resigned.
He is tragically, poetically out of moves.
Check-fucking-mate.
The shower turns on, and Ilya digs around his closet until he finds the chess board. It's simple but elegant with alternating squares of light and dark wood. He tucks it under his arm then heads back into the kitchen to grab the box before setting both on the table.
He takes a fortifying breath, rubs the cross pendant around his neck between his thumb and forefinger. He opens the box.
The pieces feel familiar in his hands, albeit smaller. The felt is starting to wear, and Ilya wonders briefly if there's anyone in the city who restores old chess sets.
He places the final piece on the board—the white knight—at the same time Shane comes out of the bedroom, hair damp and, again, draped in Ilya's clothes.
Shane takes the seat across from him, claps his hands, rubs them together. "Okay, I just need the basics. These guys can only move diagonally, right?"
Shane is holding a pawn.
"You do not know how to play?" Ilya asks. He shakes his head as the laughter bubbles up and then spills over and keeps spilling over. He doesn't know how long it goes on for, but when he finally stops, Shane looks entirely unimpressed.
"Is it really that funny?"
"Yes."
"That I don't know how to play chess?"
"Yes, but—not for reason you think."
Ilya could have been a Grandmaster. But it's not like he can just tell Shane that. He thought this would be a fun way to show him. He assumed Shane knew how to play, what with the audacious way he said, Show me and Chess, now.
Shane doesn't even know what a pawn does.
Ilya leans across the table and kisses Shane until he feels the curve of his smile return.
"I will show you how to play," Ilya says sitting back down. "It will be fun, like teaching a baby."
Shane glares at him, then something catches his attention. "Oh, there's something else in here," he says, picking up the open box and reaching inside.
Ilya knows exactly what's in there, because he put them in there many years ago. A folded-up piece of paper. Two photographs. He watches Shane intently as he examines each photograph, unfolds the aged paper. Watches as his eyes became glassy and tears collect in the corners.
"Your mother," Shane says, not quite a question.
"Da, my mother." Ilya pauses. "She could have been a Grandmaster."