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Ilya had cleaned the cottage three times.
This was, he recognized, insane behavior. The cottage was not dirty. The cottage had been professionally cleaned two weeks ago by a service he'd hired specifically because he knew that if he left it to himself, he'd scrub the kitchen floor once and declare victory, and Shane would arrive and find a cobweb and get that look — the pinched, trying-not-to-say-anything look that meant he was already mentally reorganizing every surface in the building.
So the professionals had come. And then Ilya had come, two days early, and cleaned again — not because it was necessary but because his hands needed something to do that wasn't checking his phone or calculating time zones or standing on the dock staring at the lake like a man in a Russian novel waiting for someone who might never come back from the war.
And now, the morning of Shane's arrival, he'd cleaned a third time. He'd wiped down counters that were already clean. He'd re-folded towels. He'd reorganized the fridge, which contained: Shane's protein powder (the specific brand, ordered online, because Ilya was a man who paid attention), the expensive yogurt Shane would pretend he didn't care about and then eat in one sitting, actual food that Ilya intended to cook, and beer, because Ilya was on vacation and he was going to drink beer on the dock and no one could stop him.
Anya was asleep by the kitchen door, having exhausted herself the day before racing between every room of the cottage like she was conducting a security sweep.
Ilya turned back to the counter. He was making pirozhki — his mother's recipe, or the version of it he'd reconstructed from memory and three failed attempts and one phone call to his aunt in Moscow who'd talked him through the dough with the patient exasperation of a woman who couldn't believe her nephew had made it to thirty-one without learning to cook properly. The filling was beef and onion. The dough was rising. The kitchen smelled like home — not the cottage, not Ottawa, but the older home, the first one, the one that existed now only in smells and sounds and the particular way flour felt between his fingers.
He was making pirozhki because Shane was coming, and when Shane arrived he would be hungry because Shane was always hungry after flights even though he'd never admit it, and because Shane had spent an entire season in San Jose eating sad California health food and drinking green smoothies that tasted like lawn clippings, and because Ilya loved him and love, for Ilya, had always been a thing you did with your hands.
His phone was on the counter. Shane's last text, from two hours ago: Boarding now. See you soon.
Soon. The word was a key turning in a lock. Soon, after a season of later and eventually and six more weeks. Soon, after phone calls at midnight and voicemails played eleven times and the slow, corrosive loneliness of watching the person you loved exist on a screen instead of in your arms.
Ilya picked up his phone. Put it down. Picked it up again.
He typed: I am making pirozhki. Anya is judging me. Cottage is clean. I am going insane. Please arrive faster.
Shane replied almost immediately — he must have been on the tarmac, the plane not yet moving: You can't rush a plane, Ilya.
Have you tried asking nicely
That's not how aviation works.
You don't know. Maybe pilot is Russian. We respond to charm.
I have to go. They're closing the doors.
Fly safe. I will be here.
I know.
Ilya stared at the two words. I know. Said the same way Shane had said "you too" for months before he'd learned to say the real thing — compressed, controlled, the entire ocean of feeling stuffed into the smallest possible container. But Ilya heard what was underneath. He always heard what was underneath.
He put the phone down. Went back to the dough. Shaped the pirozhki with hands that were not quite steady and told himself it was because of the dough.
It was not because of the dough.
Shane's rental car pulled into the gravel drive at 4:47 PM.
Ilya knew the exact time because he'd been standing at the kitchen window for twenty minutes, which was pathetic, and because the sound of tires on gravel was a sound his body had been waiting for since September, which was worse.
He watched Shane park. Watched him sit in the car for a moment — just sitting, hands on the wheel, the way Shane did when he was transitioning between selves. Airport Shane becoming cottage Shane. The version of him that belonged to schedules and obligations and the specific performance of being a professional athlete shedding itself, layer by layer, in the front seat of a rental car in the driveway of a cottage in Ontario.
Ilya wanted to run outside. He stayed at the window. Gave Shane the moment because he knew Shane needed it, the same way he knew Shane took his coffee black and stretched his left hip first every morning and couldn't fall asleep without the window cracked open, even in winter. The accumulated knowledge of loving someone for years. A library of small facts. Ilya's most prized possession.
Shane got out of the car. He was wearing jeans and a soft green t-shirt Ilya had never seen, and he looked — different. Not bad. Just different. The San Jose sun had done something to him, lightened his hair, added color to his skin, and he looked healthy and slightly unfamiliar, like a word in a language Ilya spoke fluently that had shifted its pronunciation while he wasn't listening.
Shane reached into the backseat for his bag. Straightened up. Looked at the cottage.
Looked at the window where Ilya was standing.
Their eyes met through the glass, and Ilya felt it in his sternum — a physical impact, a thud, the way you felt the bass at a concert before you heard it. Shane's face did something complicated — a sequence of micro-expressions that anyone else would have missed, that Ilya read like a headline: relief, fear, want, relief again, and underneath all of it, the staggering vulnerability of a man who had driven to a cottage to be loved and wasn't sure he still knew how to accept it.
Ilya went to the door.
He opened it and stood in the frame and Shane was walking toward him across the gravel, bag over one shoulder, and Ilya said, "Hi," and his voice did something he hadn't authorized — it cracked. Just slightly. Just enough.
Shane dropped his bag on the ground three feet from the door and crossed the remaining distance in two steps and put his arms around Ilya and held on.
Not kissing. Not talking. Just holding. Shane's face in Ilya's neck, Shane's arms locked around his ribs, the full weight of Shane's body pressing into him with the gravitational certainty of something that had been falling for months and had finally, finally hit solid ground.
Ilya wrapped around him. One hand on the back of Shane's head, the other flat between his shoulder blades, holding him the way you held something you'd been terrified of losing — tight enough to feel, careful enough not to break.
"Hi," Shane said into his neck.
"Hi." Ilya pressed his lips to Shane's temple. Breathed him in. Under the airplane smell, under the rental car and the coffee and the California sunscreen that Shane apparently still wore in June, there it was — Shane. The base note. The thing no distance or time zone could replicate or replace. "You're here."
"I'm here."
"You smell like airplane."
"Thanks."
"Is okay. I still love you. Even when you smell like recycled air and bad decisions."
Shane made a sound against his neck that was almost a laugh and pulled back just enough to look at him. His eyes were bright. Not crying — Shane Hollander does not cry — but bright. Close.
"The cottage looks good," Shane said.
"I cleaned three times."
"Three?"
"I hired professionals. Then I didn't trust the professionals. Then I lost my mind entirely and did it again."
Shane's mouth curved. The real smile, the one that lived only in private, the one the cameras and the press conferences and the twenty thousand people in any given arena never got to see. Ilya had been surviving on the memory of that smile for nine months. Seeing it in person was like stepping out of a dark room into full sun — disorienting, almost painful, so bright it made his eyes sting.
"I missed you," Shane said. Simple. Direct. No hedging, no abbreviated version. Shane Hollander, standing in the doorway of a cottage in Ontario, saying I missed you like the words cost him nothing.
The progress of it — from you too to I miss you to this, this unguarded declarative statement delivered while making eye contact — made Ilya want to pick him up and carry him inside and never let him leave.
"I missed you too," Ilya said. "I missed you an unreasonable amount. I was not okay."
"I know."
"You don't know. It was very undignified."
Shane kissed him. Finally, properly — a hand on Ilya's jaw, tilting his face, and Shane's mouth on his, and the whole world narrowed to the point of contact. It was not the desperate, teeth-and-urgency kiss of the hotel room in San Jose or the frantic reunion after twenty-three days. It was slow. Deliberate. A kiss that said I have time. A kiss that said I'm not leaving in three hours or catching a flight at dawn. A kiss that said I'm here for sixty-seven days and I intend to spend a significant number of them doing this.
Ilya kissed him back and thought: I have been the strong one for nine months. I have been the ground. I have made jokes and sent voicemails and cooked dinner in an empty apartment and pretended the silence didn't feel like drowning. I have held it together so well that even Shane believes I'm fine.
I am not fine.
But he's here now. And maybe that means I don't have to be.
He filed the thought away. Not yet. Later. Right now, Shane was kissing him in a doorway and the pirozhki were in the oven and the lake was doing its best impression of something from a painting and Anya was shoving past both of them to get to Shane, her whole body wiggling with the full-contact enthusiasm of a dog who had just discovered that her favorite person had returned from the dead.
"Your dog is going to knock me over," Shane said against Ilya's mouth.
"Our dog. You called her boyfriend's dog in November, so. Shared custody."
Shane's ears went pink. The boyfriend of it still new, still a word he was getting used to having in his mouth. Ilya loved the pink ears. Filed them in the library.
"Come inside," Ilya said. "I made pirozhki."
"You made what?"
"Russian food. My mother's recipe. You will love it or I will be devastated and also I will eat all of them myself."
He pulled Shane inside by the hand and the door closed behind them and the cottage, for the first time since Ilya had arrived, stopped feeling like a place he was waiting in and started feeling like a place he was living in. The difference was Shane. It was always Shane.
They ate on the dock.
Ilya had dragged two Adirondack chairs down to the water's edge and set up a situation that he privately considered very romantic — the pirozhki on a plate, beers in a cooler, the sun doing its slow June descent over the lake, painting the water gold and pink and the particular shade of lavender that existed only in Canadian sunsets and Russian poetry.
Shane ate four pirozhki. Then a fifth. Then looked at the plate with the expression of a man doing math he didn't want to be doing.
"Eat the sixth one," Ilya said.
"I've had five."
"Yes, and there are eight. Eat the sixth. Your body has just flown across a continent. It needs fuel."
"My body has a very specific caloric—"
"Your body is on vacation. Calories are not real at cottages. This is science."
Shane ate the sixth pirozhki. Ilya felt a warm, proprietary satisfaction that was probably disproportionate to the act of watching another person eat a dumpling, but he didn't care. Feeding Shane had always been one of his love languages — the quiet, persistent campaign against Shane's militant self-control, waged one homemade meal at a time.
"These are incredible," Shane said, which was the highest compliment Shane Hollander could pay a food item, delivered in the same even tone he used to assess a well-executed defensive system.
"I know. I am very talented."
"Modest, too."
"Modesty is for people who are not as good at things as I am."
Shane shook his head, but he was smiling, and the smile was easy — easier than Ilya had seen it in months. The last time they'd been together was the second San Jose game in March, another hotel room, another stolen night compressed into hours, both of them already calculating the countdown to the next time before the current time was even over. That Shane had been tightly wound, performing normalcy, the mask so firmly in place that even Ilya had to work to see behind it.
This Shane was different. Not relaxed — Shane Hollander did not relax, he merely tensed at various altitudes — but closer to it. The cottage did this to him. It was the only place Ilya had ever seen Shane fully lower his guard, the only geography that consistently cracked the armor. Something about the lake. The quiet. The fact that this was the place Shane had built with his own choices, before anyone told him what his life was supposed to look like.
They sat in the chairs and drank their beers and watched the sun set, and Ilya let the silence do what silence between them had always done best — hold everything that didn't need to be said yet.
After a while, Shane said: "The hoodie."
"What?"
"My hoodie. The gray Voyageurs one. You said you stole it."
"I did steal it. Is mine now."
"It's mine. You put it in your note. 'You can get it back when I see you.'"
"Hmm." Ilya considered this. "I said this, yes. But I have reconsidered. It smells like me now. Is basically my hoodie."
"It smelled like me when you took it. That was the point."
"Yes, but your smell wore off and mine replaced it. This is natural law. Survival of the fittest smell."
"That's not how — Ilya, that's not how any of this works."
"Is exactly how it works. You can have it back when it smells like you again." He paused. Glanced sideways. "Which will require you being here. In the hoodie. For an extended period."
Shane looked at him. The sunset was catching his eyes, turning the brown to amber, and his expression was doing the complicated thing again — the rapid-fire sequence of emotions that Ilya read like braille.
"I'm here for sixty-seven days," Shane said quietly.
"Sixty-seven days."
"That's more time than we've ever had."
"Yes."
"Continuous time. Same place. Same—" Shane's voice snagged. "Same time zone."
"Same time zone," Ilya agreed, and reached across the space between their chairs and took Shane's hand. Shane's fingers threaded through his immediately, grip firm, the way Shane held things he was afraid of losing.
They sat like that until the sun finished setting and the mosquitoes came and Anya collapsed across both their feet with a sigh.
"I kept the note," Shane said.
"What?"
"Your note. The one you hid in the moving box. It's in my nightstand in San Jose. I've read it—" He stopped. The pink ears again. "A lot. I've read it a lot."
Ilya's chest ached. He thought about Shane in that apartment in San Jose — the apartment that smelled like new carpet, in a city that was too sunny, on a coast that was too far — opening a nightstand drawer and reading a note written in Ilya's terrible handwriting on a torn piece of paper. Reading it once, twice, a hundred times. Using it the way Ilya had used Shane's voicemail — as proof. As evidence that the thing between them was real and ongoing and not something they'd imagined.
"I wrote that note very fast," Ilya said. "While you were in the bathroom. I almost got caught."
"It was perfect."
"My handwriting is terrible."
"It was perfect, Ilya."
The way Shane said his name. The two syllables carried like a held breath, like a word Shane had been storing up for months and was finally allowed to release. Ilya heard the weight of it. Felt it settle in his ribs.
"Come inside," Ilya said. "The mosquitoes are eating me alive and also I would very much like to take you to bed."
Shane looked at him. The sunset was gone now, replaced by the deep blue of a June evening, and in the half-dark Shane's face was all angles and shadows and those eyes, those ridiculous eyes that Ilya had first noticed across a faceoff circle when they were both nineteen and everything was a competition and the wanting was something he didn't have a name for yet.
"Yeah," Shane said. "Okay."
They cleaned up the dock together — Shane stacking plates with the efficiency of a man who found disorder physically painful, Ilya carrying the cooler — and then Shane followed Ilya into the cottage and down the hallway to the bedroom without looking back.
The bedroom was the same. The creaky bed. The window that let the morning light in. The nightstand where Ilya's Russian novel still sat, a bookmark at page sixty-three, untouched since last August. The room smelled like cedar and clean sheets and the particular stillness of a space that had been waiting.
Ilya turned to face Shane and found Shane already looking at him with an expression that made Ilya's breath catch — raw, unguarded, the mask nowhere in sight. Shane Hollander, standing in a bedroom in a cottage in Ontario, looking at Ilya like he was the only thing in the world that made sense.
"I need to say something," Shane said.
"Okay."
"I know I'm — I know I'm not good at this. The talking part. The feeling-out-loud part. You've been—" Shane's jaw worked. "You've been so patient. All year. The phone calls at midnight. The voicemails. The note. Being the one who always says it first, who always reaches out, who always—" His voice thinned. "You held me together, Ilya. When Montreal traded me, when I broke down in your kitchen, when I was sitting in that apartment in San Jose staring at Instagram like a pathetic—you held me together. And I never asked if anyone was holding you."
The words landed like a stone in still water. Ilya felt the ripples spread outward through his chest, and underneath them — underneath the warmth of being seen, being known — something shifted. Something he'd been pressing down for nine months.
"Shane—"
"Let me finish." Shane stepped closer. Put his hands on Ilya's waist. His thumbs traced slow circles against Ilya's hipbones through his shirt. "I'm here for sixty-seven days. And I don't want to spend them being the person who takes and takes and never asks. So I'm asking. How are you?"
The question — simple, direct, three words — cracked something open that Ilya had been very carefully keeping closed.
He opened his mouth to say I'm fine. It was the default. The automatic response. The word that covered everything from I'm genuinely okay to I am quietly falling apart and I need you to not notice because if you notice I will have to feel it and I am not ready to feel it. He'd deployed it a thousand times — to teammates, coaches, reporters, the man at the coffee shop who asked how his day was going. Fine. Always fine.
He looked at Shane's face. The openness of it. The effort it had taken to stand here and ask instead of deflect.
"I am not fine," Ilya said.
The words came out quieter than he intended. Almost surprised, as though he hadn't quite given them permission to exist.
Shane's hands tightened on his waist. "Tell me."
"Not now." Ilya covered Shane's hands with his own. "Tomorrow. Or the next day. We have sixty-seven days. Right now I just want—" He pulled Shane closer by the belt loops, the way Shane had pulled him into the Montreal apartment after twenty-three days, the echo deliberate. "Right now I want you. The rest can wait."
Shane studied him for a moment — the captain's assessment, the quick, thorough read that missed nothing — and Ilya could see him deciding: push or yield. The old Shane would have yielded immediately, would have let the deflection stand because confronting emotion was a thing other people did. This Shane — the one who'd learned to say I love you out loud, who'd called at 4 AM from Vancouver, who'd left a voicemail in San Jose that began with I miss you — this Shane held his gaze and said, "Tomorrow. Promise me."
"I promise."
"Okay." Shane's expression shifted, the concern giving way to something darker, hungrier. His thumbs dug in against Ilya's hipbones. "Then come here."
Ilya went.
They kissed standing up, in the space between the bed and the door, and it started slow — reacquainting, remembering — and then Shane made a sound against his mouth, a small, desperate hum, and the slowness burned away like fog.
Ilya's hands found the hem of Shane's shirt and pulled it over his head, and Shane did the same to him, and then they were skin to skin, chest to chest, and the contact — the sheer, annihilating reality of Shane's bare skin against his after months of nothing but his own hands and a phone screen — hit Ilya like a wave. He made a sound he wasn't proud of. Shane swallowed it.
They fell onto the bed. The mattress creaked — the familiar, protesting groan that had soundtracked every night they'd ever spent here, the sound that meant home in a language that was older and truer than any Ilya spoke. Shane was under him, pulling him down, hands on his back, his shoulders, his ass, touching him everywhere with the systematic urgency of a man conducting an inventory of something he'd been afraid was lost.
"God," Shane breathed. "Your body. I forgot how you — the weight of you—"
"You forgot my body?" Ilya kissed down Shane's jaw, his neck, the spot behind his ear that made Shane's breath stutter. "This is very insulting. My body is unforgettable."
"Shut up. You know what I — fuck — you know what I mean."
Ilya did know. He knew because he'd felt the same thing in San Jose, in the hotel room after the game — the shock of re-contact, the way the body stored memory differently than the mind, the way touching Shane after an absence felt like hearing a song he'd forgotten he knew every word to.
He kissed down Shane's chest. Took his time. Mapped the territory with his mouth — the ridge of his collarbone, the plane of his sternum, the soft skin below his navel where Shane was ticklish and would deny it to his grave. Shane's hands were in his hair, gripping, not guiding — just holding on.
"I want to go slow," Ilya said against Shane's stomach. "We have time. I want to go slow."
"Okay." Shane's voice was already wrecked. "Okay, slow. Yeah."
Ilya undid Shane's jeans. Pulled them down, and his boxers, and Shane lifted his hips to help and they were gone, and then Shane was naked on the bed in the cottage where Ilya had fallen in love with him, and the sight of it — the long lines of his body, the flush spreading down his chest, the way his cock was already hard and flushed against his stomach — made Ilya's brain go white for a second.
"You are so beautiful," Ilya said, and meant it the way he meant everything he said to Shane — completely, without performance, in the voice he used only here, only for this, the voice that was not the charming Russian or the flashy center but just Ilya, the person underneath all of it.
Shane's ears went pink. His whole face went pink. "You don't have to—"
"I don't have to. I want to. You are beautiful and I have missed you and I am going to take my time with you tonight. Is this okay?"
Shane looked up at him from the pillow, flushed and hard and trying very hard not to look as affected as he was, and said, "Yeah. That's okay."
Ilya took his time.
He kissed down Shane's hip. The crease of his thigh. The inside of his knee, which made Shane twitch and exhale sharply. He mouthed along the inside of Shane's thigh, feeling the muscle tense and release under his lips, and Shane's hands tightened in his hair and his breathing went ragged.
"Ilya, please—"
"Patience." He pressed a kiss to the juncture of Shane's thigh and hip. "I have been thinking about this for months. You can give me a few minutes."
"A few minutes is going to kill me."
"You will survive. You are very tough. Captain Hollander. Ironman." He wrapped his hand around the base of Shane's cock and felt Shane's whole body jolt. "My boyfriend."
The word — still new, still bright — made Shane's eyes flutter shut. Ilya stroked him once, slowly, base to head, and then took him in his mouth.
Shane's response was instantaneous and gratifying — a sharp intake of breath, his hips lifting off the bed, his hand fisting in Ilya's hair. Ilya held his hip down with one hand and worked him with his mouth, slow and thorough, savoring the weight and taste of him, the sounds he made — broken, bitten-off, the sounds of a man who controlled everything in his life except this.
Ilya had thought about this in Ottawa. In his apartment, alone, in the dark. Had lain in bed and closed his eyes and imagined this — Shane's body under his hands, Shane's voice saying his name, the particular helpless noise Shane made when Ilya took him deep. He'd touched himself to the thought of it and come with Shane's name on his lips and then lain in the dark afterward feeling the ache of the distance like a bruise on the inside of his ribs.
Now Shane was here. Real, warm, alive under his mouth. And Ilya wanted to make it last, wanted to worship every inch of him, but Shane was already trembling, already close — nine months of wanting compressed into the span of Ilya's mouth — and Ilya pulled off before Shane could come because he wanted more. Wanted everything.
"Don't stop," Shane gasped. "Why did you—"
"Because I want to be inside you." Ilya kissed his hip. "I want to feel you. All of you. Is that okay?"
Shane's eyes were dark, pupils blown. He nodded. "Yes. God, yes. Nightstand — I put — there should be—"
"I restocked." Ilya reached for the nightstand drawer. "Two days ago. You are not the only one who plans ahead."
"That might be the most romantic thing you've ever done."
"I have my moments," Ilya said, and the sincerity in Shane's voice — delivered while naked and flushed and breathing hard — made Ilya's hands shake as he opened the lube.
He took his time with this too. Pressed one slick finger inside and felt Shane tense and release around him, watched Shane's face — the crease between his brows, the way he bit his bottom lip, the moment the tension broke and his whole body softened. Added a second finger. Curled them. Shane's back arched off the bed and he made a sound that was Ilya's name and a curse tangled together.
"More?"
"More. Yes. Now."
"So bossy." Ilya added a third finger, worked him open with patient, deliberate strokes, and watched Shane come apart beneath him — the control dissolving, the mask dissolving, everything dissolving until there was nothing left but Shane, raw and wanting and reaching for Ilya with shaking hands.
"Now," Shane said. "Please, Ilya, now—"
Ilya withdrew his fingers. Slicked himself. Positioned himself between Shane's thighs and pushed inside in one long, slow stroke, and the feeling of it — the tight heat, the intimacy, the way Shane's body opened for him like a door he'd been knocking on for nine months — made Ilya drop his forehead to Shane's shoulder and breathe through the wave of sensation that bordered on too much.
"Oh," Shane whispered. His legs wrapped around Ilya's hips. His hands found Ilya's back, nails pressing half-moons into his skin. "Oh, fuck, Ilya—"
"I know." Ilya's voice was barely there. "I know. I'm here."
He moved. Slow, deep, the pace he'd promised — rolling his hips, feeling Shane take him fully with each thrust, watching Shane's face for every reaction. And Shane gave him everything — no mask, no control, just the open, devastated expression of a man being touched by the person he loved after too long without it.
"I missed this," Shane said, and his voice cracked. "Not just — not just the sex. This. You, close. I can feel your heartbeat."
Ilya pressed deeper. Changed the angle. Shane cried out — sharp, unguarded — and his nails raked down Ilya's back and Ilya hissed at the sting and loved it.
"Say it," Ilya murmured against his ear. "The thing you say. The thing that is mine."
Shane knew. Shane always knew. "Yours," he gasped. "I'm yours."
"Mine." Ilya thrust harder, and Shane moaned, and the sound went straight through Ilya's body like electricity. "You are mine, Shane Hollander. Three thousand miles, different time zones, I don't care. Mine. Always mine."
"Always. Always. Ilya—I'm close—"
"Touch yourself. I want to watch."
Shane reached between them, wrapped a hand around himself, and Ilya watched his face as he stroked — the flush, the parted lips, the way his eyes stayed locked on Ilya's even as his body tightened toward release. And there it was again — the vulnerability. The willingness to be seen. The thing Shane had spent his entire life hiding from everyone except Ilya, offered here in a cottage in Ontario with the window open and the lake outside and no one for miles.
"Come for me," Ilya said. "I want to feel it."
Shane came. His whole body seized — back arching, legs tightening around Ilya's hips, his mouth open in a silent cry that became Ilya's name on the exhale. He clenched around Ilya and Ilya felt it everywhere, felt it pull him over the edge, and he buried himself deep and came with a groan that he muffled against Shane's neck, his body shuddering, Shane's arms locked around him like he'd never let go.
The aftermath was quiet. Long and quiet and warm. They lay tangled together, sticky and breathing hard, and neither of them moved to clean up. Ilya stayed inside Shane as long as he could, their bodies still joined, Shane's fingers tracing lazy patterns on his back.
"That was..." Shane started.
"If you say 'vigorous,' I am leaving."
Shane laughed — a real laugh, startled out of him, the kind that crinkled his eyes and showed his teeth and made Ilya's heart do something embarrassing. "I was going to say perfect."
"Perfect is acceptable." Ilya kissed the corner of his mouth. "You may say perfect."
They cleaned up eventually. Ilya ran a washcloth under warm water and brought it back to bed and wiped Shane down with a gentleness that made Shane go very still and very quiet, the way he always did when tenderness caught him off guard.
Ilya put on sweatpants. Shane — as predicted — put on the gray Voyageurs hoodie, which Ilya retrieved from his side of the closet and presented with the solemnity of a diplomat returning a treaty document.
"It smells like you," Shane said, burying his nose in the fabric.
"Told you."
"I don't hate it."
They got into bed. Anya jumped up and settled at the foot with a heavy thud, and neither of them told her to get down.
Shane curled into Ilya's side, his head on Ilya's chest, one arm across Ilya's stomach. Ilya pulled the blanket over both of them and rested his chin on the top of Shane's head and listened to the cottage settle around them — the creak of the walls, the wind off the lake, the sound of two people breathing in the same room for the first time in months.
"Ilya?" Shane's voice was drowsy already.
"Mm."
"Thank you for the pirozhki."
"You are welcome."
"And for cleaning three times."
"You are welcome for that too."
"And for being here. For getting the cottage ready. For — all of it. The whole year. Thank you."
Ilya pressed his lips to Shane's hair. His chest ached with a feeling he didn't have a word for in any language — the specific tenderness of being thanked for something you would have done regardless, without question, without hesitation, because the person asking was the person you'd chosen and choosing them was not a sacrifice but a privilege.
"Always," he said. "Go to sleep, Shane."
Shane went to sleep. His breathing evened out, slow and deep, his body heavy and warm against Ilya's side. The lake was quiet outside the open window.
Ilya lay awake for a long time. He held Shane and stared at the ceiling and felt the thing he'd been pressing down shift inside him — not yet surfacing, not yet demanding to be felt, but closer now. Rising like water. He'd promised Shane tomorrow. He'd promised the truth.
He wasn't sure what the truth looked like. He only knew it had been building for nine months — the loneliness he hadn't named, the grief that wasn't his but lived in him anyway, the exhaustion of being the steady one, the ground, the person who always picked up the phone and always had the right thing to say and always, always kept it together.
Tomorrow. He'd fall apart tomorrow. Tonight, Shane was here and the space between them was zero and that was enough.
It had to be enough.
They'd been at the cottage less than a week when it happened.
Not dramatically. Not with a catalyst or a trigger or a single identifiable moment. It happened the way Ilya had always suspected it would — quietly, in the middle of something mundane, the structural failure of a wall that had been bearing too much weight for too long.
They were in the kitchen. Shane was washing dishes — because Shane Hollander washed dishes immediately after meals, as though leaving a plate in the sink for ten minutes constituted moral failure — and Ilya was drying, and they were talking about nothing. The weather. A podcast Shane had been listening to. Whether the dock needed re-staining this summer.
Normal. Easy. The domestic banality of two people sharing a kitchen, which was a luxury so extraordinary that Ilya had spent every day since Shane's arrival marveling at it — the simple fact of being able to hand Shane a towel, to bump his hip against Shane's, to exist in the same room without a countdown clock ticking in the background.
Shane handed him a plate. Their fingers brushed. And Ilya looked at Shane's hand — the familiar shape of it, the calluses, the short nails — and something inside him gave way.
Not a crack. A collapse.
His vision blurred. His throat closed. The plate was suddenly very heavy in his hands and then it wasn't in his hands at all — he'd set it on the counter, or dropped it, he wasn't sure — and he was gripping the edge of the counter with both hands and his shoulders were shaking and the sound coming out of him was not a word or a sob but something in between, something involuntary and raw and so fucking embarrassing that he wanted to fold himself into the cabinet and disappear.
"Ilya?" Shane's voice, sharp with alarm. The water shutting off. "Ilya, what—"
"I'm sorry." The words came out strangled. "I'm sorry, I don't — I don't know why—"
"Hey. Hey." Shane's hands on his shoulders, turning him. Shane's face, close, concerned, startled. "What's happening? Talk to me."
Ilya couldn't talk. That was the problem. He'd spent nine months talking — talking on the phone, talking in texts, talking to his own apartment, talking talking talking as a substitute for the one thing that language couldn't replace, which was presence. And now Shane was present, right here, two feet away, touching him, and the thing Ilya had been holding at bay with words could no longer be held.
"The apartment," Ilya managed. "Your apartment. In Montreal. I went — after you left for San Jose, I went back. To return the key you gave me. And it was empty."
Shane's face changed.
"All the boxes were gone. Your things. The — the smell of you. Everything. I stood in the living room and it was just — walls. And carpet. And nothing." Ilya's voice was breaking in ways he hadn't known it could break. "And I thought — this is what it sounds like. This is what the silence sounds like when someone you love is taken away from you. Not by death, not by choice, but by a spreadsheet. By men in suits doing math."
"Ilya—"
"I drove home. Two hours back to Ottawa. And the whole drive I kept — I kept reaching for my phone to call you, and then remembering that calling you would mean you'd hear it. You'd hear that I was not okay. And I couldn't do that to you. Not on your first week in San Jose. Not when you were already—" His voice splintered. "So I just drove. Two hours of silence. And when I got home I sat in the parking garage for another hour because the apartment was going to be empty and quiet and I was going to walk in and there would be no shoes by the door and no sounds from the kitchen and I would have to just — live in that. Every day. For months."
He was shaking now. Not the contained trembling of the first few seconds but something deeper, something structural, as though the framework that had been holding him upright since September was finally giving way.
"And the worst part—" Ilya's hands were gripping the counter so hard his knuckles were white. "The worst part is that I knew how to do it. I knew how to be alone. I have been alone before — after my mother, after everything. I know how silence works. I know how to fill a room by myself. And I thought I was past that. I thought I had built a life where I didn't have to do that anymore. Two hours, Shane. We had two hours. And they took it and I had to go back to being the person who is fine. Who is always fine. Who holds the phone and makes the jokes and says 'we will figure it out' because someone has to say it and it was always going to be me."
Shane pulled him in. Hard, arms around him, the same way Ilya had held Shane in that kitchen months ago when the trade call came. The same kitchen. The same position. Reversed.
And Ilya broke.
Not the way Shane broke — not in spirals and pacing and words spilling out too fast. Ilya broke quietly. He pressed his face into Shane's shoulder and cried with the terrible, silent efficiency of a man who'd had years of practice at not being heard. His body shook but the sounds were small — half-swallowed, muffled — and Shane held him and said nothing, because Shane had learned from Ilya that sometimes silence was the thing you needed, and sometimes being caught was enough.
"I didn't tell you," Ilya said, his voice wrecked. "I didn't tell you how bad it was because you were drowning and I couldn't — you needed the ground, Shane. You needed someone to be steady. And I wanted to be that for you. I would do it again. But it cost—" He pulled a shuddering breath. "It cost me."
"I know." Shane's hand was on the back of his head, cradling. "I know it did. I'm sorry I didn't see it sooner."
"You couldn't see it. I was very good at hiding."
"You shouldn't have had to hide. Not from me." Shane pulled back. Took Ilya's face in his hands. Thumbs on his cheekbones. His eyes were fierce — the captain's eyes, the ones that saw everything, the ones that had been seeing everything for months and had finally decided to look. "I spent a decade hiding from you. You're not allowed to do the same thing back."
Ilya laughed — wet, broken, the kind of laugh that was just crying's neighbor. "Is not the same. You were hiding because you were afraid. I was hiding because I love you and you were hurting and—"
"And you thought your pain was less important than mine."
The accuracy of it silenced him.
"It's not," Shane said. Firm. Certain. The voice he used when he was absolutely sure about something, which was rare, because Shane Hollander was sure about very little except hockey and Ilya. "Your pain is not less important than mine. It's not less valid because you're not the one who got traded. You lost me too. You lost the two hours too. You sat in that apartment and missed me and held it together and didn't tell anyone, and that—Ilya, that's not strength. That's just suffering alone."
Ilya stared at him. This man. This impossible, infuriating, emotionally constipated man who had spent years unable to say I love you out loud and was now standing in a kitchen delivering the most accurate emotional assessment Ilya had ever received.
"When did you get so smart?" Ilya asked.
"I've always been smart. I just used to aim it at hockey instead of feelings."
"And now?"
"Now I'm aiming it at you." Shane's thumb traced the line of Ilya's cheekbone, catching a tear. "Because you're mine, and mine means I take care of you too. Not just the other way around."
Yours.
The word, their word, the thing they'd built between them in hotel rooms and phone calls and twenty-three-day separations and three-thousand-mile silences — it settled over Ilya like a blanket. Like a hand on the back of his neck. Like someone saying I see you and meaning it.
"I'm tired, Shane." The confession was small and enormous. "I am so tired of being okay."
"Then stop being okay. Be whatever you are. I'm here. I'm not going anywhere. And even when the summer ends I'm not — I'm just going to a different city. I'm not leaving you. Do you understand that? San Jose is where I play hockey. This—" Shane's hand moved from Ilya's face to his chest, pressing flat over his heart, and his fingers found the chain there — the thin gold chain, the cross that had been Ilya's mother's, that Ilya had worn against his skin for twenty years. Shane's thumb traced the shape of it through Ilya's shirt the way he always did, the way he'd done the first time he'd discovered it in a hotel room years ago and understood, without being told, that it was sacred. "This is where I live."
Ilya looked down at Shane's hand over the cross, over his heart, and the two things it was touching — his mother's love and Shane's — were so close together they were almost the same thing.
He covered Shane's hand with his own. Pressed it harder. Let Shane feel his heartbeat — fast and ragged and alive — and the cross warm between them.
"That is—" Ilya sniffed. "That is extremely romantic for a man who once described an orgasm as 'vigorous.'"
Shane's mouth twitched. "Are you going to hold that against me forever?"
"Yes. Minimum forever. Possibly longer."
"There's nothing longer than forever."
"Russian forever is longer. We invented extra time for feelings."
Shane kissed him. Soft, this time. No urgency. Just a mouth against his that said I'm here, I'm here, I'm here, the three words that had been Ilya's lifeline for nine months, now delivered in person, in a kitchen, with tears still wet on his face and the late afternoon light coming through the window.
They stood there for a long time. Holding each other in the kitchen. The dishes half-done. The lake outside.
The ground had shaken. Shane had not fallen.
David called on a Sunday morning.
Shane took it on the dock, sitting in the Adirondack chair with his feet up on the railing, his voice doing the particular warm-but-controlled thing it did when he talked to his father. Ilya could hear the muffled shape of the conversation through the open window — not the words, just the cadence. Shane's voice rising at the ends of sentences. David's lower register, steady, the same measured patience that Shane had inherited and deployed differently.
Ilya made coffee and brought two mugs out to the dock and sat in the other chair and didn't pretend he wasn't listening.
"Yeah, he's here," Shane was saying. "He's been here since — yeah. The whole summer." A pause. "I know, Dad."
Ilya handed Shane his coffee. Shane took it, mouthed thank you, and continued: "We're good. We're really good, actually. It's been—" Another pause, longer. Shane's expression softened. "Yeah. I know. I will. Okay. I love you too."
He hung up. Stared at the phone.
"Your dad says hi?" Ilya guessed.
"My dad says hi." Shane sipped his coffee. "He also says you're welcome for Sunday dinner anytime and that Mom wants to know if you have any dietary restrictions, which she's asked three times now and the answer hasn't changed."
"I eat everything. Your mother knows this. She watched me eat an entire pie at Thanksgiving."
"Stubbornness is genetic. Together our children will be unstoppable."
The word — children — landed between them like a bird alighting on a branch. Light, alive, slightly startling. Shane went still.
They'd talked about this. Abstractly, hypothetically, in the future-tense way of people who were not yet in a position to make it real. Someday. When we're out. When the geography is fixed. When the world knows about us and we can build a life instead of stealing one.
"Ilya," Shane said carefully.
"I'm not proposing anything. I'm just — making an observation about genetics." Ilya sipped his coffee. "Very scientific. Do not read into it."
Shane looked at him for a long moment. Then he said, "It wouldn't be the worst thing."
"What?"
"Kids. Someday. With you." Shane's ears were crimson. He was staring at the lake with the fixed intensity of a man trying to will the water into providing emotional cover. "It wouldn't be the worst thing."
Ilya's heart was doing something medically concerning. He kept his face neutral. "High praise, Hollander. 'Not the worst thing.' I will put this on the adoption application."
Shane kicked his ankle under the chair. "You know what I mean."
"I do know." Ilya reached over. Took Shane's hand. "And for the record — it would not be the worst thing for me either."
They sat with it. Let the words exist in the air between them and the lake beyond them and the future somewhere out past the tree line. Not a plan. Not yet. Just a door, cracked open.
"Your parents are good," Ilya said. "The way they just — fold me in. Like I belong at the table."
"You do belong at the table." Shane's thumb traced circles on Ilya's knuckles. "They love you. Dad practically considers you a second son at this point. He asks about you more than he asks about me."
"He is a good man, your father."
"He's the best man I know."
"Second best." Ilya squeezed Shane's hand. "I am the best man you know. Your father is close second."
Shane shook his head, but he was smiling, and the smile was the real one, the private one, and the morning was gold on the water and Ilya thought: this. This is the thing that made nine months of loneliness survivable. Not the phone calls. Not the voicemails. This — the knowledge that it was waiting. That he was waiting. That the cottage and the dock and the chair and the hand in mine were all waiting, patient and certain, on the other side of the distance.
This is what I was holding on for.
"I want to come out," Shane said.
Ilya's hand tightened. "What?"
"Not today. Not this summer. But — soon. Next season, maybe. I want to—" Shane exhaled through his nose. The determination on his face was the same expression he wore in overtime, the I am going to do this thing and no one is going to stop me look. "I'm tired of the burner accounts, Ilya. I'm tired of the hotel rooms and the fake excuses and pretending you're just a rival. My parents know. Your family knows. But the rest of the world — I want to post a photo of you on my real Instagram. I want to bring you to the team holiday party. I want to sit next to you in public and not have to lie about what you are to me."
Ilya couldn't speak.
"I know the risks. I've done the math. I've been doing the math for years — the contracts, the endorsements, the media, all of it. And I used to think the math didn't work. That the cost was too high." Shane turned to look at him, and his eyes were clear and steady and absolutely certain. "The math was wrong. The cost of not having you is higher. The cost of this—" He gestured between them, the dock, the cottage, the hidden life. "This half-life. This in-between. That's the real cost. And I don't want to pay it anymore."
Ilya set his coffee down because his hands were shaking and he didn't want to spill it on himself during what was clearly the most important conversation of his life.
"You are sure?" he asked. His voice was rough. "Shane, this cannot be taken back. Once the world knows—"
"I know."
"Your career. Your endorsements. Everything you've built—"
"Everything I've hidden." Shane's jaw set. "I've built my career on being perfect. On being the golden boy, the franchise player, the captain who never makes mistakes. And you know what that's gotten me? A trade by spreadsheet and an apartment in San Jose that smells like nothing." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "You're the best thing in my life, Ilya. And I've been treating you like a secret. Like something to be managed. That's not — you deserve better than that. You've always deserved better."
Ilya looked at the lake. The water was bright and still and endlessly patient, the way it always was, the way it had been when Shane had first brought him here years ago and said this is my place, nobody knows about it and Ilya had understood that he was being given something more precious than a key.
"I would like that," Ilya said. "Very much. I would like the world to know you are mine."
"And that you're mine."
"That I am yours." Ilya pulled Shane's hand to his mouth. Kissed his knuckles. "Although I should warn you — when the world finds out, they will see my Instagram. The real one. And they will have questions about why I post so many shirtless gym photos."
"The shirtless gym photos are an act of war and you know it."
"They are an act of art. My body is a canvas."
"Your body is a provocation."
"You love my body."
"I do," Shane said simply. "I love all of you. Every ridiculous, infuriating, shirtless inch."
Ilya smiled. The real one — the one that matched Shane's, the one the cameras never got, the one that was only for this: the dock and the lake and the person who made every distance worth crossing.
The weeks unfolded.
Not quickly — nothing at the cottage moved quickly, which was the point, which was the mercy of it. Time at the cottage had a different texture than time anywhere else. It was thick and slow, measured not in hours but in meals cooked and swims taken and the number of times Ilya caught Shane reorganizing a cabinet that didn't need reorganizing because his hands needed something to do.
They fell into a rhythm that was so close to the life Ilya wanted permanently that it hurt to think about too carefully. Mornings: Shane ran, Ilya made coffee, they ate breakfast on the dock. Afternoons: swimming, reading, the slow maintenance of a property that needed attention after a winter of neglect. Shane fixed the screen door. Ilya re-stained the dock, badly, and Shane re-stained it again, correctly. They argued about the best way to organize the shed and both recognized, mid-argument, that they were arguing about a shed and started laughing and didn't stop for five minutes.
Evenings were the best. Ilya cooked — rotating through his mother's recipes and the Canadian dishes he'd learned from Yuna and the random things he'd picked up from teammates over the years — and Shane sat at the counter and talked to him while he worked, and the kitchen smelled like whatever was in the pan and outside the windows the lake went through its nightly performance of turning every color the sky could think of. After dinner, the dock. Beers or tea or nothing. The chairs. The silence that held everything.
Some nights they didn't talk at all. Just sat and watched the water and held hands across the space between the chairs and let the quiet say what it said.
Some nights they talked about everything. The future. What coming out would look like, practically — the conversations with agents, with teams, with PR people. Shane had already started making lists. Of course he had. Ilya found the lists on a legal pad by the bed one morning and read them and his chest went tight with how much love was encoded in Shane's meticulous handwriting: Talk to Farah. Talk to Stallions PR. Draft statement — OUR words, not theirs. Timeline: November? After Thanksgiving. Call Hayden first.
"You found my lists," Shane said from the doorway.
"I found your lists. You have scheduled our coming out like a product launch."
"It needs to be strategic."
"You have a sub-list called 'anticipated media questions.' There are fourteen items."
"There will be questions, Ilya."
"Item seven is 'how long have you been together.' You have written three possible answers depending on whether we count from the first kiss, the first 'I love you,' or the first—" Ilya squinted. "What does 'DTR' mean?"
Shane's ears went red. "Define the relationship."
"You are the most insane person I have ever loved."
"Is that a compliment?"
"It is the highest compliment I know."
Shane took the legal pad back. But he was smiling.
They drove into town for groceries. They took Anya on long walks through the woods behind the property, coming back muddy and scratched and arguing about whether they'd seen a moose or a large deer. (Ilya maintained it was a moose. Shane maintained that Ilya had never seen a moose in his life and was therefore not qualified to identify one. Ilya pointed out that he had lived in Canada for twelve years and Shane said living in Canada didn't automatically grant moose identification credentials, and they were still arguing about it three days later.)
Shane's parents drove up for a weekend. David grilled steaks. Yuna brought a pie and flowers and the specific, careful warmth of a mother who knew her son was in love and was handling it with the grace of a woman who had been waiting for years for Shane to let himself be happy. She hugged Ilya in the kitchen — long, firm, the way she hugged Shane — and said, "Thank you for taking care of him," and Ilya said, "He takes care of me too," and meant it more than he'd ever meant anything.
The summer deepened. July became August. The days grew shorter by minutes they could feel. And underneath the sweetness of it — the cooking and the swimming and the arguments about moose — the end was approaching with the quiet certainty of a tide.
Neither of them mentioned it. They didn't need to. They could feel it in the way Shane held him a little tighter at night. In the way Ilya cooked a little more elaborately, as though he could extend the summer through the sheer force of a complicated recipe. In the way they both avoided looking at the calendar on the kitchen wall, where the date of Shane's flight back to San Jose was circled in red — Shane's handwriting, because Shane was a person who wrote things on calendars and faced them, even when facing them felt like staring into an oncoming train.
The last night arrived the way last nights always did — too soon, without permission.
They lay in the creaky bed and listened to the lake.
The window was open. The air smelled like pine and water and the particular sweetness of a Canadian summer night that Ilya had spent the entire season memorizing. Shane was pressed against Ilya's side, his head on Ilya's chest, his hand tracing idle circles on Ilya's stomach.
"I don't want to do the countdown," Shane said.
"Then we don't."
"Last time — after the twenty-three days, and after the trade — I counted. Every day. I counted the days until I could see you again and it was—" He exhaled. "It was like watching a clock and willing it to go faster and knowing it wouldn't."
"So this time, no counting."
"No counting. Just — you'll be there. Wherever I am, you'll be there. Maybe not in the same room or the same time zone, but—"
"I will be there," Ilya said. "I will call at stupid o'clock. I will text during morning skate. I will post shirtless gym photos specifically to torment you."
"Ilya—"
"I will fly standby. I will drive through the night. I will fake a groin injury."
"You said that a year ago."
"And I meant it then and I mean it now. No more twenty-three days, Shane. No more counting." Ilya tightened his arm around him. "We are Shane and Ilya. We have survived everything. A few months until I see you again is nothing. Is a blink."
Shane was quiet for a moment. Then: "It's not going to be like last year."
"No?"
"No. Because last year I was — I was still figuring out how to need you. How to say it. How to let you in." Shane propped himself up on one elbow. In the dark, Ilya could see the shape of his face, the line of his jaw, the way his eyes caught the faint light from the window. "I'm not figuring that out anymore. I know how to need you. I know how to say it. And when I get to San Jose, I'm going to call you every night, and I'm not going to send 'you too' and I'm not going to watch you from a burner account in the dark. I'm going to tell you I love you. Out loud. Every time. Because you deserve the real version. Every time."
Ilya's chest was full of something enormous. Something that didn't have a name in any language but felt like the opposite of the loneliness he'd been carrying — not the absence of it, but the replacement. Something warm and solid in the space where the ache had been.
"Shane Hollander," Ilya said. "You are the most emotionally evolved person I have ever met."
"Don't push it."
"You have grown so much. I am so proud. Someone should alert the media."
"I take it back. I'm sending 'you too' forever."
Ilya laughed and pulled him down and kissed him, and Shane kissed him back, and outside the window the lake did its patient, timeless thing, and the cottage held them the way it always did — quietly, solidly, without asking anything in return.
"Ilya?"
"Mm."
"Next summer."
"Next summer."
"And every summer after that."
"Every summer." Ilya ran his fingers through Shane's hair. "Until the summers run out. And then whatever comes after summers."
"That doesn't make sense."
"It makes Russian sense. Very poetic. You wouldn't understand."
Shane smiled against his mouth. "Try me."
"It means—" Ilya searched for the words. Found them in the place where all his truest words lived, the place between languages, the place that was only Shane's. "It means wherever you are is where I want to be. And wherever I am is where you can find me. And the space between is just — space. It's just air and time and geography. And none of it is bigger than this."
Shane's hand found his over his heart — found the cross, the chain, the way he always did now. Pressed flat. The same gesture from that afternoon in the kitchen when Ilya had broken apart and Shane had caught him. A circuit completed.
"None of it," Shane agreed.
They fell asleep like that. Tangled together, breathing in sync, Anya warm at their feet. In the morning, Shane would pack and Ilya would drive him to the airport and they would stand by the car and not say goodbye because they'd decided, somewhere over the course of this summer, that goodbye was a word that didn't apply to them.
There would be a flight. A time zone. A season. The distance would come back, because the distance always came back — it was the tax they paid for loving each other in a world that hadn't yet made room for them.
But there would also be this: a cottage on a lake in Ontario that belonged to both of them now. A dog who loved them both without condition or complication. A gray hoodie that smelled like both of them. A word — boyfriend — that sat warm and certain in their mouths. And behind it, waiting, a bigger word. A someday word.
A word that sounded like forever in every language.
The cottage would be here. The lake would be here. And wherever Shane was, wherever Ilya was — the space between them was just space. And space, as Ilya had learned, was nothing compared to the thing that crossed it.
It had never been.