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Prologue
Shane Hollander noticed men the way other people noticed weather: constantly, involuntarily, and with the vague sense that acknowledging it would ruin his plans.
It started young. Fourteen, maybe. The locker room, obviously, because every coming-of-age crisis for a closeted athlete began in a locker room - it was so cliché it was almost insulting. But there it was: Shane, fourteen, lacing his skates, and the boy across the bench stood up and stretched and his shirt rode up and Shane's eyes caught the strip of stomach, the cut of hip disappearing into waistband, and something inside him went oh.
Not a revelation. Not yet. Just a crack. A hairline fracture in the wall he hadn't known he was building.
He looked away. He always looked away.
By sixteen, looking away was a skill he'd perfected. He looked away from the defenceman with the jaw. He looked away from the forward who smelled like cedar and took his shirt off in the parking lot after summer practices. He looked away from the magazine covers and the movie posters and the men on the street who caught his attention for reasons he refused to examine.
He dated girls. Of course he dated girls. He was Shane Hollander - first-round draft pick, future face of the franchise, his mother's perfect son, the league's model citizen. He took Jenny Park to prom and bought her the exact corsage she wanted and wore the cologne she liked and kissed her in the back of the limousine and felt... nothing. Not revulsion. Not discomfort. Just the flat, neutral sensation of going through motions his body didn't recognize.
It's nerves, he told himself. It's the pressure. It'll click eventually.
It didn't click.
Not with Jenny. Not with the girl at the All-Star weekend party who was beautiful and willing and pressed against him in a hallway while his teammates cheered. Not with the model his agent introduced him to - good for your image, Shane, the sponsors love a power couple - who was objectively stunning and who Shane kissed goodnight with the same passion he brought to reading ingredient labels.
The men, though. The men were a different problem.
On vacation in Cancún with teammates, nineteen, drunk on cheap tequila, Shane had wandered away from the group and found himself in a bar where the lighting was different and the music was slower and a man with dark eyes and brown skin had looked at him across the room and smiled, and Shane's whole body had lit up like a switchboard.
They'd kissed in the alley behind the bar. Shane's back against brick, the man's hands in his hair, his thigh between Shane's legs. It was messy and beer-flavoured and lasted maybe three minutes before Shane's panic caught up with his want and he'd shoved the man away and walked back to the resort with his heart slamming and his cock hard and his brain screaming what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck.
He didn't sleep that night. He lay in his hotel bed and stared at the ceiling and bargained with himself: it was the tequila. It was the atmosphere. It didn't mean anything. You're not - you're not that.
A year later, in Prague for an exhibition game, he let a man suck him off in a hotel room.
He'd been careful about it - a different hotel from the team's, cash for the room, his hat pulled low, a local escort service. The man was golden haired, beautiful, with clever hands and a mouth that made Shane's vision go white, and when he came down the man's throat he felt, for approximately thirty seconds, the closest thing to rightness his body had ever produced during sex with another person.
Then the shame hit. A wall of it, a tsunami, drowning everything. He'd dressed in silence, tipped the man absurdly (as though money could buy back the closet door), and caught a cab back to the team hotel.
It was hot. He knew it was hot. His body had told him so in the only language bodies speak: want, hardness, the involuntary hitch of breath, the way his skin went electric under a man's touch in a way it never did under a woman's. Shane's body had been trying to tell him something since he was fourteen, and Shane had spent the intervening years shoving his fingers in his ears and humming very loudly.
Because here was the thing: Shane Hollander was a professional athlete in a sport that worshipped a very specific kind of man. Tough. Stoic. Heterosexual. The kind of man who fucked models and married sportscasters and produced children who played peewee hockey in their father's jerseys. The kind of man who called things gay as a punchline and grabbed ass in the locker room with the confidence of someone who had never once considered that the grabbing might be reciprocated with interest.
No one in the league was out. No one in the history of the league had been out while playing at the top level. There were whispers, sometimes - rumours about this player or that one, trading-card speculation, the kind of thing that got discussed on anonymous message boards and never, ever, in team meetings. The message was clear. It had been clear since Shane was a teenager, absorbing it through the walls of every locker room and every team bus and every postgame bar:
You can be anything you want here. Except that.
And Shane wanted, with a ferocity that made his teeth ache, to be the best. To be the captain. To win the Cup. To stand at the top of a sport he'd given his entire childhood to and know he'd earned it. He wanted that more than he wanted anything, and the anything included understanding his own body.
So he'd made a deal with himself. An unspoken contract, signed in silence, witnessed by no one: he would not think about it. He would date women. He would perform heterosexuality with the same discipline he brought to his training. He would channel whatever this was - this confusion, this ache, this persistent, unbearable noticing of men - into hockey. Into anger. Into the clean, uncomplicated violence of checking someone into the boards.
It worked. Mostly.
Except for Ilya Rozanov.
Rozanov was a problem that no amount of discipline could solve, because Rozanov existed in Shane's professional life, which meant Shane could not avoid him, and Rozanov existed in a body that seemed specifically engineered to dismantle Shane's composure. He was tall and broad and golden and he moved on the ice with a predatory grace that made Shane's mouth go dry, and the worst part - the absolute worst part - was the rivalry.
The rivalry meant contact. It meant checking and shoving and getting pinned against the boards with Rozanov's body pressed to his, Rozanov's breath on his neck, Rozanov's voice in his ear: comfortable, Hollander?
It meant adrenaline and anger and arousal braided so tight together that Shane couldn't tell them apart anymore. It meant playing the best hockey of his life against a man whose forearms he fantasised about at three a.m. It meant hating Rozanov with his whole chest and wanting him with his whole body and being unable to untangle the two.
Shane was twenty-six years old. He was the captain of the Montreal Voyageurs. He had a Calder Trophy and multiple All-Star appearances and a face that had launched a Calvin Klein campaign.
He had never been fucked.
He had never admitted to himself, out loud, in words, that he wanted to be.
And then Rose Landry walked into his life, and everything cracked wide open.
***
I. Rose
The thing about Rose Landry was that she made everything look easy.
She made award shows look easy, leaning into Shane's side with her hand resting on his thigh while cameras detonated around them like mortar fire. She made dinner parties look easy, laughing with his mother over wine while his mother oohed and aahed about everything in the woman's posture, dress, and career trajectory. She made Shane look easy - like a man who had his life so thoroughly figured out that he could date one of the most famous actresses in North America and still show up to morning skate at six a.m. with a clear head and a crisp edge to his crossovers.
What Rose Landry could not make look easy was fucking.
Not for lack of trying. God, not for lack of trying. Rose was gorgeous - objectively, mathematically, by any metric the human species had devised for measuring physical beauty. Long blonde hair, clear skin that glowed under every light source known to man, the kind of body that had earned her a Vogue cover and a very persistent rumour about a Brazilian director. She kissed like she meant it. She touched him like she wanted him, and the worst part, the part that made Shane want to crawl out of his own skin and apologise to every woman who'd ever had the misfortune of taking off her clothes in front of him, was that she did want him.
And he wanted to want her back.
He tried. He tried the way he tried everything: with discipline, with effort, with the grim determination of a man who had been told his entire life that hard work was the answer to every question. He kissed her neck. He touched her breasts, which were beautiful. He went down on her, which she seemed to enjoy, and which he was apparently good at in a detached, mechanical way that he suspected had more to do with his willingness to follow instructions than any genuine enthusiasm.
And then she'd reach for him, and his body would just... not cooperate.
"It's fine," Rose said, the fourth time it happened. She was lying on her side in his bed in Montreal, sheet pulled up to her waist, one hand resting on his chest with her fingers tracing idle patterns. Her voice was so gentle it made his teeth ache. "Seriously, Shane. It happens."
"It doesn't happen. Not four times."
"It's stress. You've got the playoffs coming up, and your agent called three times during dinner-"
"It's not stress."
The words came out sharper than he intended, and he felt Rose's fingers still on his chest. The silence that followed was worse than the conversation, because Rose Landry hadn't become one of the most successful actresses of her generation by missing subtext.
She didn't push it that night. She kissed his forehead and told him she was going to shower, and Shane lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling and thought about Ilya Rozanov's arms.
Not on purpose. It just happened, the way intrusive thoughts happened - a flash of memory, tactile and unwanted: Rozanov's strong arms braced against the boards as he pinned Shane during last week's game, the heat of his body close enough that Shane could smell the sharp, clean sweat through both their jerseys, the shift of muscle under skin as Rozanov's grip tightened and his mouth found Shane's ear.
"Comfortable, Hollander?"
That low rasp, half-mocking, the accent curling around Shane's name like smoke. Shane had shoved him off and taken a retaliatory shot to the ribs and played the rest of the period with the phantom pressure of Rozanov's body against his back and an inconvenient half-chub he had to skate off during the TV timeout.
It didn't mean anything. Shane found a lot of people attractive. He'd found the redhead at J.J.'s birthday party attractive. He'd found his dentist attractive, and his dentist was a fifty-three-year-old man named Gerald.
The redhead was a woman and Gerald was a dentist and neither of them had made his cock twitch in the middle of a professional hockey game.
Rozanov was just... a problem. A specific, asshole-shaped problem that Shane compartmentalized the way he compartmentalized everything: shove it in a box, tape the box shut, put the box in a closet, barricade the closet door, and never, under any circumstances, open it during a conversation with his girlfriend about why he couldn't get hard.
***
Rose brought it up two weeks later.
They were in her kitchen in Los Angeles, the morning after another failed attempt, and she was making eggs with a focus that suggested the eggs required the full power of her concentration. Shane sat at the breakfast bar with a protein shake he'd already finished and a glass of water he was gripping like it owed him money.
"Can I ask you something?" Rose said, not turning from the stove.
"Sure."
"And you won't get weird about it?"
"I'm already weird about everything, so."
She turned. The spatula in her hand dripped egg onto the tile and she didn't seem to notice. Her eyes were careful in the way they got during difficult scenes - present, open, ready to absorb whatever came next without judgment.
"Are you attracted to men?"
The glass nearly went through his hand.
"I'm not-" Shane started, and then stopped, because the denial that had been sitting at the tip of his tongue his entire adult life suddenly weighed more than he could lift. "I don't know."
"That's okay."
"I notice... guys. Sometimes. It doesn't mean anything."
"It might mean something."
Shane's jaw locked. His back teeth pressed together so hard he felt the pressure behind his eyes. Rose set the spatula down and came around the counter, and she was so small next to him - he forgot, sometimes, how small she was, because her presence took up so much room - and she stood between his knees and put her hands on either side of his face.
"Shane. Whatever is happening, we can figure it out."
"I want to be with you," he said, and meant it so fiercely that his voice cracked. Because he did. He loved Rose. He loved her laugh and her brain and the way she argued with directors and the way she looked at him like he was worth looking at. He wanted to build a life with her. He wanted to want her body the way she wanted his. He wanted to be normal and easy and straight, and the wanting of it was so enormous that it left no room for the other wanting, the one that lived in the locked closet with the boxes.
"I know," Rose said. "I know you do, baby."
She kissed him, soft, and then pulled back with her thinking face on. It was the same expression she got when she was puzzling out a character's motivation - brow slightly furrowed, lower lip caught between her teeth, eyes unfocused.
"What if we tried something different?" she said.
***
The something different started small.
Rose had done her research, because Rose always did her research, because she was a woman who had won a SAG Award at twenty-six by refusing to walk onto a set without understanding her character's psychology down to what she ate for breakfast.
"I read some things," she said, casually, like she was talking about a restaurant review and not a WikiHow article on prostate stimulation. "About what some guys enjoy. Would you be open to... trying a few things? With me?"
Shane, whose face was approximately the colour of a fire truck, said yes.
The first time was a finger. Rose's, slicked up, barely past the first knuckle, while she stroked him with her other hand. Shane had lain on his back with a pillow over his face and his thighs trembling, and when she found the right angle and pressed, something went off inside him like a tripped wire and he came so hard his vision whited out.
He'd stared at the ceiling for three full minutes afterward while Rose cleaned up, feeling simultaneously like he'd unlocked a cheat code and like the universe had just confirmed every terrifying thing he'd been hiding from.
"Good?" Rose asked.
"Yeah," Shane said faintly. "That was... yeah."
"So we do more of that."
They did more of that.
It escalated the way these things did when Rose Landry was in charge of the project: methodically, thoroughly, and with a spreadsheet. (She didn't actually make a spreadsheet, but Shane was pretty sure one existed in her head.) Small plugs came first. Then medium ones. A prostate massager that vibrated at four different settings and made Shane come untouched for the first time in his life, face-down in a hotel pillow in Vancouver, biting the cotton so hard he left teeth marks.
The vibrator was Rose's idea, and it was also Rose's idea to make him wear it.
"I have a premiere next week," she said, holding up a small silicone plug with a Bluetooth remote. "In New York. Red carpet, afterparty, the whole thing. And I want you to wear this."
Shane looked at the plug, then at Rose, then at the plug again.
"On the red carpet."
"On the red carpet."
"With photographers."
"With photographers, yes."
"Rose-"
"You don't have to." She set it on the counter between them. "But I think you want to. I think you'd like it."
She was right, and she knew she was right, and the thing that made Shane's stomach flip wasn't fear - it was the thrill. The forbidden, illicit, frankly insane thrill of walking a New York red carpet with Rose Landry on his arm and a vibrating plug pressed against his prostate, his perfectly tailored Armani hiding the fact that he was one buzz away from coming in his dress pants.
He wore it.
Rose controlled the remote from her clutch, and she was a monster about it - turning it on during interviews, during the carpet walk, once during the actual film screening when the theatre went dark and Shane gripped the armrest hard enough to crack it. By the time they got to the afterparty, Shane was half-delirious, his cock throbbing in his pants, precome soaking through his boxer briefs, holding a champagne glass with white-knuckled fingers while Rose smiled beatifically at the fashion editor of W Magazine and clicked the vibrator up a level.
He'd fucked her in the bathroom of the afterparty with his pants around his ankles and the plug still inside him, and it was the hardest he'd ever been with a woman, and they both knew it wasn't her that got him there.
After, with his forehead pressed to the cold tile of the bathroom wall, Rose's hand between his shoulder blades, she'd said: "Shane? I think maybe we need to try something more."
***
The pegging conversation happened three days later.
"I want to feel... taken." Shane said it to his hands, which were gripped together in his lap the way they always were during conversations that terrified him. Knuckles white, tendons standing. "I know that sounds-"
"It doesn't sound like anything except what you want," Rose said. She was sitting cross-legged on the bed, watching him with that patient, present expression. "I can do that for you, you know."
She bought a harness. She bought a dildo - silicone, not too big, with a slight curve. She made him pick the colour, which somehow felt more intimate than any of the sex they'd had. He chose dark blue, then immediately wanted to die.
"Navy," Rose said approvingly. "Classic Hollander."
The timing was not an accident, though Shane didn't realise it until later.
They'd played Boston the night before. The Bears were their biggest rival, had been since the expansion, and Ilya Rozanov played for Boston the way a wolf played with a carcass: with intent, with teeth, and with the understanding that everything on the ice belonged to him.
Shane had taken three hits from Rozanov that game. The first was clean, a shoulder-to-shoulder check along the boards that rattled Shane's cage and earned Rozanov a cheer from the Boston crowd. The second was dirtier - a cross-check to Shane's lower back during a board battle that the refs missed and Shane's kidneys did not.
The third was the one that stayed with him.
Third period, tie game, ninety seconds left. Shane was cutting through the neutral zone with the puck when Rozanov came off the bench like a fucking missile, angling toward him with the kind of predatory focus that made Shane's lizard brain scream danger and his hindbrain scream something else entirely. The hit caught Shane high, Rozanov's arm coming across his chest, slamming him into the boards chest-first. Shane's stick went flying. His helmet cracked against the glass. And Rozanov was there, the full length of him pinning Shane to the boards, hips grinding forward, one gloved hand fisted in the back of Shane's jersey.
"Stay down, Hollander," Rozanov growled, and Shane's cock went instantly, mortifyingly, catastrophically hard.
He'd played the last ninety seconds of a tied hockey game with an erection and a bruise blossoming across his shoulder blades and the sense memory of Rozanov's breath on his neck.
They lost. Of course they lost.
And then he went home, and Rose pegged him for the first time, and it was-
-okay, it was a lot.
Rose was careful. She was always careful. She had him on his stomach first, worked him open with her fingers the way she'd learned to over the past months. Two, then three, until Shane was grinding into the mattress and making sounds that would have embarrassed him if he'd had any shame left. She kissed his spine while she opened him up, murmured praise - you're so good, baby, you're doing so well - and the praise hit him in a place he didn't know he was hungry.
Then the harness.
Rose stepped into it with a businesslike efficiency that Shane found both grounding and surreal. She adjusted the straps at her hips, clicked the dildo into the O-ring, and the dark blue silicone jutted out from her small frame with an absurdity that should have killed the mood but didn't, because Rose looked down at it and then up at him and said, completely deadpan: "I feel powerful. I get it now. I understand men."
Shane choked out a laugh, and she grinned, and then the grin softened into something more serious.
"Okay. How do you want it?"
"On my stomach."
"Okay. Pillow under your hips?"
He grabbed one. Positioned it. Lay face-down with the pillow tilting his hips up, his face pressed into the mattress, arms folded under his head. He felt exposed. Spread. He was already hard, had been since the third finger, and his cock pressed into the pillow beneath him.
Rose's hand settled on the small of his back. Steadying. Then the blunt head of the dildo pressed against his rim, slicked and warm from her hand.
"Ready?" she asked.
"Yes."
She pressed in slow. The stretch was different from fingers, different from plugs - wider, longer, filling him up in a way that made his breath stutter and his fingers claw at the sheets. It didn't hurt, not exactly. It felt like being opened. Like someone was prying apart a door he'd spent twenty-six years holding shut, and behind it was a room full of everything he'd refused to want.
The first inch made him gasp. The second made his toes curl. By the third, Shane's mouth was open against the sheet, his breathing ragged, his body caught between the instinct to tense and the desperate need to let go.
"Relax," Rose murmured. Her hand stroked up and down his spine. "You're clenching. Breathe out and push back against me. That's it. Open up for me, baby. You're so tight. Let me in."
He exhaled. Pushed back. The dildo slid deeper, and something inside him bloomed open, a slow spreading heat that radiated out from his core.
"More," Shane gritted out.
"Yeah?"
"More, Rose."
She sank the rest of the way in, and Shane made a sound he'd never heard from his own throat - a deep, shattered groan that vibrated through his chest and into the mattress. Full. He was full, stuffed, the silicone pressing against his walls, the slight curve of it nestled perfectly against his prostate.
Rose held still. Let him adjust. Her hands were on his hips, thumbs tracing circles against his hip bones, and she was murmuring to him - you're so good, baby, you're doing so well, I've got you, you feel so good taking it like this, so beautiful - and the praise hit him in a place he didn't know he was hungry.
"Move," he said. "Please."
She pulled back slowly, the drag making Shane's breath hitch, and then pushed in again. Finding a rhythm, gentle at first - long, careful strokes that let him feel every inch. Shane's hands fisted in the sheets. His cock throbbed against the pillow beneath him, untouched, leaking.
"God, Shane," Rose breathed. "If you could see yourself right now. The way your back arches when I push in. The sounds you're making. You've never sounded like this with me before. This is what your body's been waiting for, isn't it?"
"Yes," he gasped into the mattress. "Yes, fuck -"
"That's it, baby. Take what you need. I've got you. I'm right here." She rolled her hips in a slow circle and Shane's whole body convulsed. "You like that? You like it when I go deep and stay there?"
"Harder," he said into the mattress.
"You sure?"
"Rose. Harder."
She obliged. Her hips snapped forward with more force, the slap of the harness against his ass punctuating each thrust, and the angle shifted, and she found the spot that made him see white.
"There," Shane said, or gasped, or begged. "There, right there, don't stop-"
Rose didn't stop. She fucked him steadily, finding her pace, her small hands gripping his hips with surprising strength. The rhythm became relentless - not brutal, not punishing, but thorough, each stroke dragging the curved head of the dildo over his prostate, the pressure building and building in a way that was nothing like a regular orgasm, nothing like jerking off or getting head. This was deeper. This was in his bones.
"You're shaking," Rose said. Her voice was breathless - from effort, from watching him, Shane didn't know. "Shane, you're shaking all over."
He was. His thighs were trembling, his shoulders were trembling, even his fingers were trembling where they gripped the sheets. The pleasure was enormous - too enormous, too much - a tidal wave he couldn't outrun, and it was coming for him, and he couldn't do anything but lie there and take it.
"I'm going to -" His voice cracked. "Rose, I'm going to come, I'm not even - I haven't even touched-"
"Then come. You don't need permission, baby. Just let go."
She angled her hips and drove deep, and Shane's vision whited out. The orgasm hit him like a detonation - not the sharp, localized burst of a standard orgasm but a full-body implosion, radiating out from somewhere behind his navel and rolling through him in waves. His cock pulsed against the pillow, untouched, spilling in long, thick ropes, and his body clenched and shuddered and he was crying, actual tears, his face wet against the sheet and his lungs heaving.
Rose slowed but didn't stop. She rocked into him gently through the aftershocks, letting him ride it down, and her hand found the back of his neck and held him there.
"I've got you," she whispered. "I've got you, Shane. You're okay."
He wasn't okay. He was wrecked. He was cracked open like an egg, everything inside him exposed and messy and raw. He'd spent his entire adult life performing orgasms with women - the right sounds, the right movements, the mechanical release of a body going through the motions - and this was the first time his body had taken what it wanted without his brain's permission.
His body wanted this.
Afterward, Rose eased the harness off and lay down beside him and held him while his body shook. She didn't say anything. She just stroked his hair and let him fall apart, her small body warm against his back.
That night, after Rose fell asleep, Shane dreamed.
In the dream, the hands on his hips were bigger. Rougher. The body behind him was wide and heavy and hot, the chest pressed to his back was hard with muscle, and the cock inside him - because in the dream it was a cock, a real one, thick and hot and alive - stretched him wider than the silicone ever had.
"Take it, Hollander."
That voice. Low and dark and Russian. The accent curling like smoke. A hand fisted in Shane's hair, pulling his head back, and lips against his ear-
"Good boy."
Shane woke up with his hand on his cock, already coming, Rozanov's name lodged in his throat like a bone.
He stared at the ceiling.
Okay.
Okay.
So there was that.
***
Rose and Shane lasted another month.
The ending was kind, the way everything Rose did was kind. They sat on her couch in L.A. and she held his hand and said, "I think you need to figure some things out, and I think you can't do it while you're with me."
"I love you," Shane said. It wasn't a protest. It was just a fact he needed her to have.
"I know. I love you too. And I'm going to be your friend forever, and if you ever need someone to talk to, or someone to... help you out... my door's open." She squeezed his hand. "But you deserve to be with someone who makes your body feel the way your heart does, Shane. Those things should match."
He flew back to Montreal alone.
He didn't have sex for eleven months.
***
II. Svetlana
The app was Rose's parting gift.
"It's called Rêve," she texted him, nearly a year after the breakup. "Invite-only, NDA-enforced, you need a net worth verification to even make a profile. Very discreet. Very hot people. I used it once in Paris and can confirm: zero paparazzi. You should try it."
Shane had stared at the message for three days before downloading it.
His profile was a study in paranoia: no face photo, just a shot of his torso in a plain black t-shirt, taken in a hotel bathroom mirror with his face cropped out. His bio said "28, athletic, discreet, visiting." He listed his interests as "fitness, travel, exploring." It read like a witness protection profile.
He tried a few women first. In Toronto, a corporate lawyer with sharp cheekbones and a condo overlooking the lake who kissed him efficiently and made him feel like he was being deposed. In Chicago, an heiress with a laugh like wind chimes who touched him beautifully and left him feeling nothing at all.
He deleted the app. Redownloaded it. Deleted it again. Redownloaded it in the cab to the airport.
The problem was the same as it had always been: the sex was fine. The women were fine. He was fine, meaning functional, meaning he could perform if he concentrated, if he focused on sensation instead of the body providing it. But it was performance. All of it. Another stage, another camera, another version of Shane Hollander hitting his mark and saying his lines, and the orgasms he wrung from his own body through sheer determination felt like finishing a shift rather than anything close to pleasure.
The dildos were better. He'd kept the navy blue one from Rose like a talisman, and in the privacy of his own apartment, alone, he could close his eyes and fuck himself and let the fantasies in - the ones he'd locked in the closet, the ones with hands bigger than his and bodies heavier and voices deeper, the ones that always, always, eventually resolved into one specific set of hands and one specific body and one specific voice saying stay down, Hollander - and those orgasms were real. Those cracked him open. Those left him shaking and gasping and hating himself in the dark.
Then came Boston.
Two days before the game, the team flew in early. Shane was in his hotel room, keyed up in the specific way Boston always keyed him up - restless, buzzing, the prospect of facing Rozanov again sitting in his stomach like a lit match.
He opened the app. His thumb hovered over the filters.
He'd never filtered by kinks before. He'd barely filled out the kink section of his own profile - just a vague "open-minded" that said absolutely nothing.
Tonight, for reasons he refused to examine, he tapped the filter icon and scrolled through the options until he found it.
Pegging.
Shane pressed it before he could talk himself out of it.
The results refreshed. Three profiles within five miles of his hotel. One was a couple - no. One was a woman whose photo showed only red-bottomed stilettos and a riding crop - too much. And one was-
Shane's thumb stopped.
The photo showed a woman from behind, half-turned, one hand resting on the hood of what looked like a very expensive car. Her body was long and athletic, dark skin gleaming in low light, beautiful curls pulled up in a style that was both casual and deliberate. The bio was short:
"Lana. 30. Enjoys fast cars, slow mornings, and people who can keep up. In town for the weekend. Interested in bold, adventurous company."
Under kinks, listed cleanly: Pegging, domination (light), strap play, dirty talk.
Under limits: Safe words always.
Shane's heart was hammering. He swiped right.
The match came instantly.
Lana: Well hello there, handsome torso. You're either very private or very married.
Shane: Private. Very, very private.
Lana: Good. Me too. So what brings a private man to my corner of the app at 11pm on a Wednesday?
Shane: Honestly? I'm in Boston for work and I'm... looking for something specific.
Lana: I can see that. Pegging filter. Bold move. First time with it?
Shane: No. I've... done it before. With a partner.
Lana: But you want more than she gave you?
Shane stared at the screen. The accuracy of it punched through him.
Shane: Yeah. Something like that.
Lana: I'm at the Mandarin Oriental. Bar, if you want to meet first and make sure I'm not a serial killer. You can buy me a drink and I'll decide if your torso lives up to the crop.
***
Svetlana Vetrova, in person, was a problem.
Not in the Rozanov way - not the sharp, targeted, knee-weakening problem of a man who occupied real estate in Shane's brain he hadn't consented to leasing out. Svetlana was a problem the way a sports car going ninety in a forty zone was a problem: immediate, undeniable, and impossible to look away from.
She was tall - maybe five-ten, five-eleven in heels - with the kind of body that came from either serious athletics or serious genetics or both. Half Russian, half Black, all American, she told him over her first bourbon, with a grin that said she'd been explaining the math her whole life and found it more entertaining than tedious. Her hair was amazing, her makeup minimal, her dress - black, sleeveless, ending at mid-thigh - did absolutely nothing to hide the muscle in her arms and shoulders.
She looked like she could bench-press him. Shane found this more interesting than he should have.
"So," she said, swirling her bourbon. "Torso Man. What's your actual name, or do I keep calling you that?"
"Shane."
"Just Shane?"
"For now."
"Fair. I'm Lana. Also just Lana, for now." She clinked her glass against his. "Now. You said pegging. Tell me what you've done and what you want, and be specific, because I don't like guessing."
Shane, whose face was already burning, gave her the abridged version: ex-girlfriend, toys, plugs, loved it, wanted more, hadn't found the right person.
Svetlana listened without interruption, her expression focused and warm.
"And what does more look like for you?"
Shane's hands were shaking around his glass. "Rougher," he said. "She was always... careful. Gentle. And I loved that, but I want-" He stopped. Swallowed. "I want someone who isn't afraid to really... take me."
Svetlana's grin went sharp and delighted. "Oh, honey. You came to the right girl."
***
They went to her place.
Svetlana had a suite at the hotel - not a room, a suite - and when Shane asked what she did for a living, she said "cars" with the casual brevity of someone for whom work was the least interesting thing about her.
She kissed him first. Backed him against the door and kissed him with her hands in his hair, and she was a good kisser - aggressive, confident, her tongue sweeping into his mouth before he'd finished processing the contact. It wasn't unpleasant. It was, in fact, better than most women he'd kissed, because Svetlana kissed like she was already three steps ahead of wherever his brain was trying to go.
"Bedroom," she said against his mouth. "Now."
She didn't have equipment - "I wasn't expecting company," she said, pulling a harness and strap-on from a drawer with the nonchalance of someone retrieving a phone charger - "but I'm always prepared."
The dildo was bigger than the navy blue one. Shane looked at it and felt his stomach swoop.
"Colour?" Svetlana asked.
"Green. Very green."
She laughed, low and throaty. "That's what I like to hear."
What followed was, without question, the most intense sexual experience Shane had had with a woman.
Svetlana talked. Not the way Rose had talked - encouraging, sweet, praising - but dirty, genuinely, filthily dirty, in a way that made Shane's ears burn and his cock throb. She told him exactly what she was going to do to him while she was doing it, narrated every push and drag of the silicone inside him with language that would have made a sailor blush.
"Oh, you open up so pretty for me," she breathed, sliding the strap-on in the first inch and watching his body swallow it. "Look at that. Look at your greedy little hole taking it. You been practicing, haven't you, baby? Practicing for a cock you haven't even had yet. That's so fucking hot I could scream."
She sank deeper, and Shane's fingers clawed the sheets.
"There it is," she said, finding the angle. "There's that spot. God, look at you - you take it so fucking well, you know that? Like you were made for this. Like your body's been begging for someone to fuck you properly and nobody's been listening. I'm listening, baby. I hear you."
She was rough where Rose was gentle. She grabbed his hair. She smacked his ass - once, testing, and when Shane moaned instead of flinching, she did it again, harder, and then again, and the crack of her palm against his skin sent a jolt straight through him.
"Good boy," she said. "That's my good boy. Now push back. Take all of it. Every fucking inch."
Shane pushed back. The dildo slid deep and the head pressed directly against his prostate and his vision went starry.
"Yeah, that's the face," Svetlana laughed, low and throaty, her hips snapping forward. "That's the face of a man who just realised he's been missing out. You feel that? That's what you needed, isn't it? Not some gentle little love tap. You needed someone to grab your hair and fuck you like you deserve to be fucked."
She yanked his hair. His scalp stung and his cock throbbed and he gasped out something that wasn't words.
"Tell me how it feels. Use that pretty mouth."
"It feels - fuck - it feels incredible, it feels-"
"It feels like you found what you've been looking for. Say it."
"I found - ah - what I've been-"
"Louder, baby. I want to hear you admit it."
"I found what I've been looking for!"
"Damn right you did. And I'm going to give you as much of it as you can take. Now hold on."
Shane took it. He took everything she gave him, face shoved into pillows, ass up, her hips snapping against him hard enough that the headboard knocked the wall. He came untouched, his cock jerking, splattering the sheets beneath him, and before his brain came back online she flipped him over and stroked him through a second one, her hand slick and relentless on his oversensitive cock while she whispered one more, I know you've got one more in you, give it to me, that's it, that's my good boy and the third orgasm ripped through him like a lit fuse.
He lay there. Decimated.
Svetlana brought him water. Sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed his back while his breathing evened out.
"How do you feel?"
Shane stared at the ceiling. The answer was complicated. His body felt incredible - wrung out, used, buzzing with the endorphin high of three orgasms in under an hour. His body felt better than it had felt in years. His body was finally, finally satisfied.
But underneath the satisfaction, curled up like a snake in warm sand, was the wrongness. The same wrongness he'd felt with the lawyer in Toronto and the heiress in Chicago and every woman he'd ever slept with. The sense that the pieces almost fit but not quite. That he was reaching for something his fingers kept passing through.
Svetlana's hands were good. Her voice was incredible. Her filth was top-tier.
But her hands were too small. Her shoulders were too narrow. Her voice, for all its authority, didn't land in the place inside him that he needed it to land. And when he'd closed his eyes at the end, his brain had betrayed him, the way it always did, and replaced her hands with bigger ones, her voice with a lower one, her body with-
"I feel good," Shane said, because it was true enough. "Thank you."
The next day, he played the best game of his season against Boston, and he won.
***
It became a pattern.
Shane met Svetlana every time he was in Boston, and then in other cities when their schedules aligned. Always the same arrangement: she fucked him, he kissed her, they parted. The sex was consistently excellent. Svetlana was inventive and demanding and she read his body the way a mechanic read an engine - with diagnostic precision and genuine appreciation for the machinery.
She had realised who Shane was from a huge Rolex ad in a mall which she texted to him, and he had a full 2 minute panic attack before he was okay and she called, promised and soothed him that she would never sell him out.
Their second session, she made him ride her.
It was the night after a game where Rozanov had caught Shane along the boards in the second period - not a clean check this time but a full-body pin, Rozanov's chest against Shane's back, one arm braced across Shane's collarbone, his hips flush against Shane's ass. The ref blew the whistle for interference and Rozanov had leaned in, mouth brushing Shane's ear through the cage of his helmet, and murmured something in Russian that Shane didn't understand but felt in his cock like a tuning fork.
He'd called Svetlana from the hotel room forty minutes after the final horn, still half-hard, still feeling the phantom weight of Rozanov's body against his.
Shane had never ridden anything besides a stationary bike, and the learning curve was steep and humiliating. Svetlana lay back against the headboard of her hotel room, harness on, a glass of bourbon in one hand, and watched Shane struggle to find his rhythm with the amused patience of a woman who had all night.
"You look like a baby deer on ice," she said. "Which, irony, because you are literally a professional athlete on ice."
"Shut up."
"No, I don't think I will. Lean back more. Hands on my thighs. Use those legs - I know you can squat your own body weight. You can handle a seven-inch strap."
Shane adjusted. Leaned back, planted his hands on her thighs, used the thick muscle in his quads to lift himself and drop. The new angle was - oh. The head of the dildo ground against his prostate on the downstroke, and Shane's head fell back and his mouth fell open and a sound came out of him that was somewhere between a moan and a prayer.
"That's better," Svetlana said, sipping her bourbon. "Now faster. No - keep that angle. Just faster. Use your hips, not your knees. There you go. God, your thighs. I could watch your thighs work all day. You know what you look like right now? You look like a man who just figured out what his body is for."
She set her bourbon down. Reached up and pinched his nipple, hard, and Shane yelped and his hips stuttered.
"Did I say stop? No. Keep riding. I want to see you bounce on it. That's it. Fuck, that's gorgeous. Your cock is dripping on my stomach, baby. You're making such a mess. You know what your face looks like? You look wrecked. You look like you'd do anything for this."
"I would," Shane gasped, surprising himself. "Fuck, Lana, I would-"
"I know you would. And that's what makes you so fucking hot." She slid her hand down his stomach and wrapped it loosely around his cock - not stroking, just holding, letting his own movement fuck her fist. "Now come. I want to watch it hit me."
She didn't touch him. That was the point. She lay there and drank and watched, and made him do all the work, and the power dynamic of it - the control she wielded by doing nothing, by making him chase his own pleasure while she observed - broke something loose in Shane's chest. He rode her until his thighs burned and his cock bounced against his stomach and sweat dripped from his jaw onto her flat belly.
"Good boy," she murmured, and the words punched through him like a fist. "Now touch yourself. I want to watch you come from up there."
He came with his hand on his cock and the dildo buried deep, his whole body spasming, his thighs clamping around her hips, and Svetlana watched him fall apart with the satisfied expression of a woman who'd just test-driven a very fine machine.
***
The fuck machine was session four.
Shane had flown into Boston the night before for a back-to-back series, and in the first game Rozanov had been relentless - targeting Shane every shift, hounding him through the neutral zone with a persistence that bordered on obsessive. Late in the third, Rozanov had caught him behind the net and cross-checked him into the post, Shane's shoulder slamming the iron, his helmet cracking against the crossbar. The ref called two minutes, and as Rozanov skated to the box he'd looked back over his shoulder at Shane and winked. That fucking wink. Shane had spent the entire power play trying not to think about it.
He'd texted Svetlana from the locker room: Tonight. Your place. Bring everything.
Svetlana had it in her apartment - a sleek, expensive piece of equipment that looked like a cross between a mechanical bull and something from a medical lab. Shane stared at it.
"You're joking."
"I never joke about machinery." She ran her hand along the arm, adjusting the angle. "This is a Hismith Pro. Variable speed, variable depth, eight-inch medical grade silicone. Hands-free. Which means-" she tapped the armchair facing it "-I get to sit here and direct while you take it."
"Direct?"
"Like a movie, Hollander. I'm the director. You're the star." She settled into the armchair with her bourbon. "Now get on your knees."
The machine was relentless in a way no human could be. It didn't tire, didn't slow down, didn't lose its angle. Svetlana controlled the speed from a remote, starting slow - achingly, maddeningly slow - and then building, notch by notch, while Shane knelt on all fours in front of it and lost his mind by degrees.
"Slower," he gasped.
"No." She bumped the speed up.
"Lana - fuck -"
"Yes, that's the idea. Now arch your back more. Drop your chest. Let it hit you deeper."
He dropped. The machine drove deeper. Shane's arms gave out and he collapsed onto his forearms, ass up, face pressed to the carpet, the mechanical arm pumping into him with metronomic precision. Every thrust was identical - same depth, same angle, same devastating pressure against his prostate - and the constancy of it oblitreated his ability to brace or anticipate. His body couldn't adjust because there was nothing to adjust to. Just relentless, uniform pleasure that built and built and built with nowhere to go.
"You're leaking all over my carpet," Svetlana observed. "That's an Aubusson."
"I'll - ahh - I'll buy you a new one."
"You'll buy me three. Now edge. Get close but don't come. I want to see how long you can hold it." She leaned forward in her armchair. "Look at you. Taking it like a champion. My perfect, needy, desperate boy. You know what you sound like? You sound like you're about to cry, and honestly, baby, that's the hottest thing I've ever heard. Your ass looks so pretty stuffed full. Clenching on every single stroke like you never want it to stop."
Shane whimpered. The machine didn't care. It kept going, mechanical and merciless.
"You're shaking. Whole body is shaking. How close are you?"
"So - fuck - so close, Lana, please-"
"Please what? Please let you come? Or please make it stop? Because your body is saying one thing and your mouth is saying another, and I think your body is the honest one."
Shane held it for nine minutes. He counted. Nine minutes of the machine fucking him at a speed that made his vision blur, Svetlana adjusting the angle from across the room with commentary that alternated between filthy encouragement and dry observations about his technique, his body strung so tight with need that every nerve ending was screaming.
When she finally said "come," he came so hard he screamed into the carpet, his untouched cock pulsing in long, wracking spasms that went on and on while the machine kept going, fucking him through the orgasm and into oversensitivity until he was whimpering and she finally, mercifully, hit the off switch.
"Well," she said, taking a sip of bourbon. "That was a performance."
***
The week of the Stanley Cup - Montreal's second - Svetlana called two of her friends.
The final series hadn't been against Boston, but the conference semis had, and those seven games had been the most physically brutal hockey of Shane's career. Rozanov had checked him so hard in Game 5 that Shane's mouthguard had flown out and skittered across the ice, and while Shane was on his knees fishing for it, Rozanov had skated past and tapped Shane's helmet with his glove - a patronising little pat, almost tender, and the arena had laughed, and Shane's entire body had gone hot with something that had nothing to do with embarrassment. He'd scored twice in the third period on pure, redirected fury, and Montreal had won the series in seven, and Shane had stood in the handshake line and gripped Rozanov's hand and Rozanov had pulled him close and said, low enough that no microphone caught it: "Good series, Hollander. Dream about me tonight."
Shane had dreamt about him every night since. He'd played the Finals in a haze of adrenaline and want and had lifted the Cup with bruises Rozanov had put on his ribs still yellowing under his jersey.
Shane showed up to her apartment in Boston the day after the win expecting their usual arrangement and found the door already open, music playing low, and three women lounging in the living room.
Svetlana introduced them casually: Maren, a tall Scandinavian brunette with a tattoo sleeve and a lazy smile, and Jade, a Black British woman with cheekbones that could cut glass and a laugh that filled the room. They were both beautiful. They were both, Shane gathered, Svetlana's friends in the specific way that suggested friends covered a range of activities.
"Ladies," Svetlana said, "this is Shane. He just won the Stanley Cup, and we are going to celebrate."
What followed was three hours that Shane would remember in fragments for the rest of his life.
Six hands on him at once - Svetlana's familiar and commanding, Maren's slow and exploratory, Jade's surprisingly rough. They passed him between them like an expensive dessert, taking turns - Jade's mouth on his cock while Maren kissed his neck while Svetlana watched and directed from the armchair, all three voices mingling: praise and filth and laughter, because there was laughter, so much laughter, the easy intimate humour of women who liked each other and liked him and were having the time of their lives.
They took turns with the strap. Svetlana first, because she knew his body best, while Maren sat on his face and Shane licked into her with the focus of a man who had been eating pussy professionally for years (it was the one sexual act with women he genuinely enjoyed - a fact he chose not to examine). Then Jade, who was rougher than Svetlana and made him beg for it in a posh British accent that Shane found confusingly hot.
At some point, all three of them had their mouths on him simultaneously - Svetlana kissing him, Jade tonguing his nipple, Maren's mouth on his cock - and Shane looked down at his own body, covered in women, pleasure coming from every direction, and thought: I would trade all of this for one man's hands.
He came and came. He lost count. By the end, he was boneless on Svetlana's bed, staring at the ceiling, his body a live wire that twitched at every accidental touch.
"Happy Cup Day," Svetlana said, lying beside him. Maren and Jade had retreated to the living room, laughing about something.
"Thank you," Shane said. "That was... a lot."
"Good a lot or bad a lot?"
He thought about it. "Good. Amazing, even. But..."
She waited.
"It's still not quite right," he said quietly. "There's still something missing."
Svetlana looked at him for a long moment. Her hand found his and squeezed.
"I know, kotyonok," she said. "I know."
Through it all, Svetlana spoke Russian.
Not always, and not on purpose - it slipped out when the rhythm was good, when Shane did something that surprised her. Little bursts of it between the English, endearments or exclamations or once, memorably, an extended monologue in Russian while she fucked him from behind that Shane didn't understand a word of and that nearly made him come from the sound alone.
Because Russian, in that register, from that low in someone's throat, sounded like-
He didn't finish the thought. He never finished the thought. He just closed his eyes and let the language pour over him and pretended he didn't know exactly whose mouth he was imagining it in.
***
III. Friends
The friendship crept up on them.
Shane didn't notice it happening, the way you didn't notice the sun moving - and then suddenly it was afternoon and the shadows had shifted and you were standing in a completely different light.
It started with breakfast. Svetlana, it turned out, made incredible blini - "my grandmother's recipe, and if you tell anyone I cook I will end you" - and she'd started making them after their sessions, the two of them sitting at her kitchen island in bathrobes, eating thin Russian pancakes with sour cream and jam while Svetlana told him about her week.
She sold cars. High-end, exotic, the kind that cost more than Shane's first contract. She had a dealership in Boston and was opening a second one in Miami, and she talked about torque and engine displacement the way some people talked about poetry. Shane didn't know anything about cars - he drove a black Audi that his financial advisor had recommended as "appropriate for your brand" - and Svetlana found this both appalling and delightful.
"You drive a brand-appropriate Audi," she repeated, staring at him across the island. "Shane. That's the saddest thing you've ever told me, and I know some very sad things about you."
"What's wrong with an Audi?"
"Nothing's wrong with an Audi. An Audi is a perfectly competent vehicle. An Audi is the beige paint of automobiles. An Audi is what you drive when you have given up on joy."
He talked to her about hockey. Not the way he talked about it in interviews - carefully, emptily, with clichés he'd been feeding the press since he was nineteen. Real hockey. Strategy, analytics, the way he broke down film and identified weaknesses in opposing teams' breakout patterns. The specific adjustments he'd made to his faceoff stance after studying Crosby's weight distribution. The way he tracked Rozanov's tendencies in the neutral zone, catalogueing every feint and burst, building a mental model of the man's instincts.
Svetlana listened to all of it with an interest Shane found surprising.
"The neutral zone thing," she said once, pouring more coffee. "You said Rozanov always favours his left on the entry. But what about when the boards limit his angle? Does he still cut left, or does he adjust?"
Shane blinked.
It was a smart question. A genuinely, startlingly smart question. It was the kind of question his coaching staff asked during film review.
"He... adjusts," Shane said slowly. "He goes to his off side. But it takes him longer to set up from that angle, which means if you can force him there and close the gap-"
"You make him shoot from his weaker side."
Shane stared at her. "How do you know that?"
Svetlana shrugged. "Lucky guess."
She did this a lot. Dropped observations that were too precise to be luck and too casual to be deliberate, and then changed the subject before Shane could ask follow-up questions. He filed it away the way he filed away everything - carefully, in boxes - and didn't push.
Because pushing meant losing Svetlana, and somewhere between the blini and the bourbon and the conversations about torque and neutral-zone entries, Shane had realised that Svetlana Vetrova was the easiest friend he'd ever had.
She was also the only person in his life, besides Rose, who knew the shape of what he was hiding.
***
"I think I'm gay."
He said it on a Tuesday. They were in her apartment, post-session, in bathrobes at the island. Blini and jam. Coffee in the big ceramic mugs she'd brought back from Saint Petersburg. The words came out without permission, like his mouth had been holding them prisoner and finally decided to stage a jailbreak.
Svetlana looked up from her blini. Her expression didn't change. She didn't gasp or widen her eyes or put her hand on his arm. She just looked at him with the same focused, warm attention she always gave him, and said:
"Okay."
"I mean - I'm not sure. I might be bisexual, or - I don't know. But the sex. The real sex. The only sex I've ever actually enjoyed, where my body wants what's happening instead of performing through it, is this." He gestured vaguely at the bedroom. "Getting fucked. And I don't think it's... the act itself. I think it's who I want doing it."
"And who do you want doing it?"
Shane's coffee cup was very interesting. The ceramic had a small chip on the rim. He studied it.
"Men," he said. "I want a man. I want - strong hands, and a big body, and..." He rubbed his face. "God, this is so-"
"It's not anything. It's just you telling me something. Keep going."
"I'm technically a virgin."
Svetlana's eyebrows went up. This was, apparently, the detail that cracked her composure. "Excuse me?"
"I mean - I've had sex. Obviously. With women. And with you, and with toys. But I've never..." He took a breath. "I've never been with a man. Not really. I've been kissed. I got sucked off once on a vacation, and I knew it was hot but I was so scared I couldn't enjoy it. I've never had a real - a real cock inside me. I've never sucked one. I've never even held one that wasn't my own."
"Shane Hollander." Svetlana's grin was spreading across her face like sunrise. "You are a virgin."
"I just said don't make it weird-"
"I'm not making it weird. I'm making it exciting. This is the most exciting thing you've ever told me." She leaned forward, eyes glittering. "What if I could help with that?"
"Help how?"
"I have a friend." Svetlana's voice went careful, the way it did when she was choosing her words. "He's bisexual. Very discreet, very private - also on the down-low, similar situation to yours. Rich enough that he has as much to lose as you do, so trust isn't an issue. And he's..." She paused, grinning. "He's very experienced. Very intense. And he's big, Shane. Big and strong and exactly what you just described wanting."
Shane's heart was doing something unfortunate.
"He's Russian," Svetlana added, almost as an afterthought.
The sound that came out of Shane was involuntary, and Svetlana's grin went nuclear.
"Thought so," she said.
***
IV. The Birthday
Two months passed.
Svetlana mentioned the friend periodically, casually, in the way a farmer might water a seed. He asked about you, she'd say. Or: He's very excited to meet this mystery man I keep telling him about. Or, once, with a wicked edge: I showed him a photo of your torso and he said, and I quote, 'Sveta, I will do whatever you want.'
Shane oscillated between terror and want so violently he was surprised he didn't crack in half.
Then came the game.
Montreal versus Boston, late in the regular season, one of the games that would determine playoff seeding. Rozanov was on fire - three points, two assists, a goal that he celebrated with that infuriating, panty-dropping grin of his, arms wide, skating backward while the Boston crowd lost its mind. Shane spent half the game trying to shut him down and the other half trying not to stare at the way Rozanov's jersey pulled across his shoulders when he wound up for a slapshot.
Montreal won. Barely. Shane had two goals and an assist and he wanted to throw up and he wanted to fuck someone and he wanted Ilya Rozanov's hands on him so badly that his entire body buzzed with it for hours after the final horn.
His phone rang in the locker room. Svetlana.
"Happy birthday to my best friend tomorrow," she sing-songed. "And happy early birthday present to him."
"What?"
"My friend. Tomorrow night. His birthday. And he wants to meet you." She paused. "He lives in Boston, so the timing is perfect. I'll send you the address. Be there at nine."
Shane's mouth went dry. "Lana, I'm not-"
"You're ready. Trust me. Have I ever steered you wrong?"
She hadn't. She hadn't once.
"Okay," Shane said. "Okay."
***
The house was not what he expected.
Shane's cab pulled up to a gated property in Brookline, one of those old-money neighbourhoods where the houses sat back from the street behind stone walls and mature trees. The gate opened when he gave his name to the intercom, and the driveway curved through what looked like a professional-grade car collection: a Porsche, a Mercedes AMG, a classic something-or-other that Svetlana would have been able to identify in the dark by the sound of its engine.
Svetlana met him at the door.
She looked different tonight. Not her usual bourbon casualness - she was dressed up, a gold slip dress that made her skin glow, her hair elabourate, her eyes bright with something that Shane, in retrospect, should have identified as barely contained glee.
"You came," she said. "I wasn't sure you would."
"I almost didn't. Three times."
"And yet." She took his hand and led him inside, and Shane got a brief impression of the house - enormous, tasteful, art on the walls that looked expensive, a kitchen the size of his entire Montreal condo - before she was pulling him up a staircase and down a hallway lined with closed doors.
He didn't see any photos. Nothing that identified the owner. The house was beautiful and anonymous.
(Later, he would learn that Svetlana had spent the afternoon hiding every photograph, every trophy, every piece of hockey equipment in the basement. She'd rolled up the rug in the living room because Ilya's team logo was stitched into it. She was, in every sense of the word, a criminal mastermind.)
"Okay." Svetlana stopped outside a bedroom door. "He's downstairs, getting ready. I'm going to get you ready first."
"Get me ready how?"
Her grin was the grin of a woman who had been planning this for months. She opened the door.
The bedroom was dim. Candles - actual candles, dozens of them - scattered across every surface, throwing warm, flickering light across dark sheets and a bed that was roughly the size of a small country. Music played, low, something electronic and ambient. The air smelled like sandalwood and clean linen.
On the bed, laid out like a gift: a blindfold. A pair of white lace underwear - not women's underwear, but men's, beautifully cut, delicate and obscene in equal measure. And a plug. Large, sleek, black, with a warming function that Svetlana demonstrated by pressing a button on a small remote.
"Calvin Klein could never," she said. "Now strip."
Shane stripped. His hands shook so badly it took him two tries to get his shirt over his head, and Svetlana helped him with the buttons on his jeans without comment. She handed him the lace underwear. He stepped into them and felt ridiculous and beautiful and terrified.
The plug went in slowly. Svetlana worked him open with practiced fingers first, slicking him up, murmuring encouragements, and then the plug - heated, thick, pressing against all the right places. Shane's knees nearly buckled.
"Good," Svetlana said. "Now the blindfold."
"Wait."
"Trust me, kotyonok. The blindfold makes it better. You won't have to think. You can just feel. Isn't that what you want?"
She was right. She was always right.
Shane sat on the edge of the bed. Svetlana tied the blindfold - silk, soft against his closed eyes - and the world went dark. He could hear his own breathing, too fast. He could feel the plug inside him, warm and insistent. He could feel the lace against his cock, which was already hard, already leaking through the thin fabric.
"I'll be right back," Svetlana whispered. She kissed his cheek. "Your life is about to change, Hollander. You're welcome."
The door closed.
Shane sat in the dark and trembled.
He could hear his own heartbeat. He could hear the music, the low electronic pulse of it matching the throb of the plug inside him. He could hear, distantly, footsteps. Voices. Svetlana's laugh, and then a deeper voice, also laughing, and the sound of it-
Shane's stomach dropped.
No. He was imagining things. Every deep voice sounded Russian to him now. Every low laugh was Rozanov's. He was projecting, the way he always projected, his stupid brain painting the face it wanted onto every stranger.
Footsteps on the stairs. Coming closer.
The bedroom door opened. Shane felt the air shift. He heard Svetlana say something in Russian - fast, musical, a command - and then someone else's breathing, someone close, someone who had stopped just inside the door.
Shane's whole body was shaking. Not trembling - shaking, full-body tremors that rattled his teeth.
"You can open your eyes," Svetlana said, and her voice was soft now, gentle, the voice she used when she knew he was on the edge.
She untied the blindfold. The silk slid away. Shane blinked, candlelight flooding in, and his vision resolved, and-
Ilya Rozanov was standing at the foot of the bed.
Shane's brain went white. Static. A hard reboot, all systems crashing, the blue screen of death behind his eyes. Rozanov was here. In this bedroom. In sweatpants and a t-shirt that strained across his shoulders, his hair still damp from a shower, his eyes - those insane, golden-hazel eyes - wide with a shock that mirrored Shane's own.
Shane was wearing white lace underwear and a plug and he was sitting on Ilya Rozanov's bed.
"No," Shane said, and his voice was someone else's. "No, no, no-"
He was off the bed and backing away before his brain caught up to his body, his back hitting the wall, his hands coming up in front of him like he was warding off a check. The panic hit him like a wave - not the slow build of anxiety he was used to, but a full tidal surge, his chest compressing, his vision tunneling, his lungs refusing to expand.
They know. He knows. It's over. It's all over.
"Hollander. Hollander!." Rozanov's voice. Not mocking. Not the arena voice, not the stay down, Hollander voice. Just - quiet. Careful. His hands were up, palms out, the universal gesture of I'm not going to hurt you. " Holl - Shane. Look at me."
"I can't - I can't -"
Rozanov crossed the room in two steps and did the last thing Shane expected: he wrapped his arms around him.
It wasn't a pin. It wasn't a check. It was a hug - a full, encompassing, both-arms-around-him hug, Rozanov's chin resting on top of Shane's head, his hands flat against Shane's bare back. He was warm. He was so warm, and he smelled like soap and something faintly woodsy, and his heartbeat was fast against Shane's cheek.
"Is safe," Rozanov said, into Shane's hair. "You are safe. Did not know was you. Promise. Safe here."
Shane was shaking so hard his bones hurt. He pressed his face into Rozanov's chest and tried to breathe and couldn't and tried again and couldn't and then Rozanov's hand came up and cradled the back of his skull and held him there, held him still, and something about the weight of that hand on his head unlocked Shane's lungs.
He gasped. A raw, ugly, desperate sound.
"Breathe," Rozanov said. "In. Out. Slow. I have you. Is okay. Shh. Is okay."
Behind them, Svetlana stood in the doorway. Her expression had shifted from glee to concern to something else entirely - a fierce, protective softness.
"Sveta!" Rozanov released a fast monologue said in Russian, without turning. His voice had an edge now. Sharp. A scolding.
"You're both idiots," Svetlana said, in English. Unapologetic. "You're both stubborn, scared idiots who needed your heads knocked together, and I'm not sorry."
She closed the door behind her as she left.
***
V. Ilya
Svetlana was gone. The candles flickered. The ambient music played on, indifferent to the crisis.
Shane was still pressed against Rozanov's chest, and Rozanov was still holding him, and neither of them had moved or spoken in what felt like a geological epoch.
"I'm wearing lace underwear," Shane said into Rozanov's t-shirt. "And a plug. I want you to know that, for the record. So you understand the full scope of my humiliation."
Rozanov's chest moved beneath his cheek. A laugh - small, startled, bitten off.
"I know," Rozanov said. "Is very sexy."
Shane made a sound that was approximately halfway between a laugh and a sob. Rozanov's hand stayed on the back of his head, thumb tracing a slow arc along the base of his skull.
"Hollander." Rozanov pulled back just enough to look at him. His face was close - too close - and in the candlelight his eyes were amber and gold and impossible, and he looked... wrecked. Not the cocky, performative wreckage of the ice, the grinning after a hit, but genuine: a man who had walked into his own bedroom and found his most secret want sitting on his sheets in white lace.
"I am going to say something, and you are going to listen," Rozanov said. "And then you can run away if you want. But first. Listen."
Shane nodded.
"Have been wanting you," Rozanov said, and his accent made the sentence heavier than English could support, "for years, Holl - Shane. Years. Since first time you cross-checked me and called me asshole in front of eight thousand people. Since Calvin Klein commercial Sveta showed me and I had to leave room because I was hard." His mouth twitched. "Since every time I check you into boards and you shove me off and your face goes red and I think - I think - maybe is not only anger that makes you flush."
Shane couldn't breathe again, but for different reasons this time.
"So. She tells me she has friend. Beautiful man, she says. Never been with man before. Wants to be fucked. I think, okay, good birthday gift. Did not know was you." He cupped Shane's jaw, tilting his face up. "But am very, very glad it is."
Shane kissed him.
He didn't decide to. His body just - went. Hands fisting Rozanov's t-shirt, pulling him down, mouth finding mouth. The kiss was graceless and desperate and tasted like terror and want and years of locked closets and taped-shut boxes, and when Rozanov made a low sound against his lips and kissed him back, Shane felt every wall he'd ever built crack down the middle.
Rozanov kissed the way he played hockey: aggressive, intuitive, all instinct. His hands slid into Shane's hair and gripped, angling his head, deepening the kiss until Shane's mouth opened and Rozanov's tongue slid against his and Shane moaned, actually moaned, a sound he'd never made with another person in his life.
"There you are," Rozanov murmured. "Been waiting for that sound, Hollander."
"I've been dreaming about you," Shane said against his mouth, because apparently the boxes were open now, all of them, and everything was spilling out. "For years. I dream about you holding me down. I dream about your voice. I dream about-"
"Tell me."
"Your cock." Shane's face burned. "Inside me. I've been - I've been practicing, with toys, for years, and the whole time I was pretending it was you, and I'm so fucked up, Rozanov, I'm so-"
"Ilya." Rozanov's thumb stroked his cheekbone. "Say my name."
"Ilya."
The sound Ilya made was barely human. He kissed Shane again, harder, deeper, pushing him backward until Shane's knees hit the bed and he sat down heavily. Ilya stood over him, and Shane looked up at him - at the breadth of his shoulders, the thick arms, the hard body that had been slamming him into boards for eight years - and felt something inside him settle, finally, like a key sliding into a lock it had been searching for.
"You have really never been with a man?" Ilya asked.
"Never. Not... not really."
"And you want me to be the first?"
Shane's voice was gone. He nodded.
Ilya dropped to his knees.
The visual of it - Ilya Rozanov, six-two, two-twenty, all-star forward for the Boston Bears, on his knees between Shane's thighs in candlelight - short-circuited something in Shane's brain. Ilya's hands settled on Shane's thighs, thumbs pressing into the muscle, his eyes tracking up Shane's body with an intensity that made Shane feel like he was being scouted, appraised, catalogued.
"Then I am going to take very good care of you," Ilya said. His voice had dropped into that low register, the one Shane had heard through his helmet, through the boards, through his dreams. "Am going to teach you everything. And you are going to let me. Yes?"
"Yes."
"Good boy."
Shane's entire body shuddered. Ilya noticed. Of course he noticed.
"Oh," Ilya said, soft with discovery. "You like that."
He leaned forward and mouthed at Shane's cock through the lace, and Shane's hands flew to his shoulders, fingers digging in, a choked sound punched from his lungs. Ilya's mouth was hot through the thin fabric, his tongue tracing the outline of Shane's erection, wetting the lace until it was translucent and clinging.
"Been thinking about this," Ilya said against him. "About what you taste like. What sounds you make." He hooked his fingers in the waistband of the lace and pulled - slowly, letting the fabric drag over Shane's cock - and Shane's dick sprang free, flushed and hard and leaking.
Ilya looked at it the way a man looked at a meal after a long fast.
"Beautiful," he said, and then took Shane into his mouth.
The sound Shane made was not a sound he'd ever produced before. It came from somewhere deep and primal and animal, a raw keen that he couldn't have stopped if his career depended on it, because this - this was a man's mouth, hot and wet and confident, Ilya's jaw working, his tongue doing things Shane hadn't known a tongue could do, and the suction, god, the suction-
Ilya sucked cock like he'd been thinking about it for as long as Shane had been thinking about receiving it.
His technique was devastating: slow, deep pulls that took Shane to the back of his throat, pausing there to swallow around him while Shane's hips jerked and his fingers gouged crescents into Ilya's shoulders. Then pulling off to tongue the slit, tasting the precome that was flowing freely now, humming against Shane's flushed head, looking up with those impossible eyes.
"Taste so good," Ilya murmured, his lips still brushing Shane's cock, slick and swollen. "Knew you would. Been dreaming about this cock, Hollander. About choking on it. About swallowing everything you give me." He licked a long, filthy stripe from root to tip, then sucked the head back in, hollowing his cheeks. "Give me more. Want to feel you in my throat."
"That's-" Shane couldn't form sentences. "That's so-"
"Use words, Hollander. Tell me how feels."
"It feels like I'm going to die. It feels like I've been waiting for this my whole life. It feels-" His voice broke. "Ilya, please."
Ilya pulled off with a wet, obscene pop and stood, stripping his t-shirt over his head in one motion. Shane's hands reached for him before his brain gave the command - palms flat against Ilya's bare chest, feeling the heat of his skin, the hard planes of muscle, the scatter of golden hair. He was bigger up close. Broader. The body that had checked Shane into boards a hundred times was right here, under his hands, warm and breathing and real, and Shane couldn't stop touching him.
"Lie back," Ilya said. "On back. Want to see your face for first time."
Shane lay back. Ilya reached between his legs and found the plug and pressed it deeper before pulling it slowly, agonizingly, free. Shane whimpered at the loss, his body clenching on nothing.
"Shh." Ilya's hand settled on his stomach, warm and steadying. "Am replacing with something better. You trust me?"
"Yes."
"Good. Because this-" Ilya palmed his own cock through his sweatpants, and even through the fabric Shane could see the thick outline of it, could see the wet spot where precome had soaked through, "-this has been yours for years, Hollander. Just didn't know it yet."
He shoved his sweatpants down. Shane looked at Ilya's cock - thick, flushed dark, curving slightly, definitely a 9 incher, real - and his mouth actually watered.
Ilya slicked himself up. The condom went on with practiced efficiency, and then he was positioning himself, the blunt head of his cock nudging Shane's rim, and Shane looked down between their bodies and saw it - thick, flushed, alive - and his whole body went tight with want.
"Breathe," Ilya said. "Look at me. Only at me."
Shane looked at him. Ilya's eyes held his. And then he pushed inside.
Nothing - nothing - had prepared him for this.
Not the navy blue dildo. Not Svetlana's strap. Not the fuck machine or the vibrators or the years of solo practise. Because this was alive. This was heat and pulse and the micro-movements of another body adjusting to his, and Ilya's cock was thick enough that the stretch burned sweet and brutal, and Shane felt himself opening for it the way a door opened for a key, his body recognising what it had been waiting for.
"Oh god," Shane gasped. "Oh god-"
"Good?" Ilya gritted out, and his voice was strained, his arms trembling where they braced on either side of Shane's head, and Shane realised with a jolt that Ilya was holding himself back, forcing himself still, letting Shane's body adjust.
"Move," Shane said. "Ilya, move."
Ilya moved.
The first thrust made Shane's back arch off the bed. The second made him grab Ilya's shoulders. The third found the spot, and Shane cried out, a sound that bounced off the walls and echoed in the candlelit room, and Ilya's rhythm locked in - deep, steady, relentless, each stroke dragging over Shane's prostate on the way in and the way out.
"That is it," Ilya breathed against his throat, hips snapping forward, each word punctuated by a thrust. "That is what you needed. All this time. All these years. Fucking yourself on toys, pretending. Was always supposed to be me inside you." He bit Shane's earlobe, tugging. "Say it. Tell me."
"You," Shane gasped. "It was always you."
"Louder. Want to hear."
"It was always you, Ilya -"
"Da. Da. And now you have me." Ilya shifted his angle, drove deeper, and Shane's vision went white. "Now you have real cock, real man, and you are going to come on it like good boy. Yes?"
Shane wrapped his legs around Ilya's waist and pulled him deeper, and the angle changed, and he screamed.
Not moaned. Not gasped. Screamed. A real, full-throated, utterly unhinged sound that would haunt him forever, and Ilya's response was to groan against his neck and fuck him harder.
"So tight," Ilya growled. "So fucking tight and hot and perfect. Been dreaming about this, Hollander. How you would feel. How you would sound taking my cock for first time." He pulled almost all the way out, just the head inside, stretching Shane's rim. "Reality is better. You are better. Prettiest thing I ever fuck."
He slammed back in, and Shane sobbed.
"More. Give me more. Want to hear every sound. Nobody else gets these sounds. Only me."
Shane couldn't speak. He could only nod, and hold on, and take it. The fullness was overwhelming - not just the physical stretch of Ilya's cock inside him, but the weight of him, the heat, the way Ilya's body covered his completely, the way Ilya's hips drove into him with the same power he used on the ice. This was the body that checked him into boards. This was the body he'd been dreaming of. And it was here, and it was real, and it was fucking him into the mattress with a thoroughness that rewired Shane's understanding of what sex could be.
He came without being touched. His cock jerked between their bodies, untouched, and the orgasm hit him like a train - white-hot, full-body, tearing a sob from his throat. Ilya fucked him through it, his rhythm faltering only when Shane's body clenched around him and dragged a groan from his chest.
"Again," Ilya said, and reached between them. His fist closed around Shane's oversensitive cock and Shane whimpered, his body trying to twist away, but Ilya held him down with his weight and stroked him, slow and firm. "Can feel you clenching on me. Body wants more even if brain says no. Give me one more, solnyshko. One more for me."
Shane came again seven minutes later with Ilya's fist around his cock and Ilya's cock still buried inside him, and the second orgasm was so intense his vision went black at the edges and he heard himself making sounds that weren't language - just raw, animal noise, his body shaking so hard the bed frame knocked against the wall.
Ilya followed him over with a sound like something breaking, his hips stuttering, his face buried in Shane's neck, and Shane held him through it, legs locked around his waist, both of them trembling.
Silence.
Just breathing. Two heartbeats, gradually slowing.
Ilya lifted his head. Shane looked up at him: flushed, wrecked, hair stuck to his forehead, eyes soft in the candlelight.
"Happy birthday," Shane said weakly.
Ilya laughed. A real laugh, startled and warm, his face crinkling, and he dropped his forehead to Shane's and laughed until the bed shook.
***
VI. 48 Hours
Shane called in sick.
"Fever," he told his coach, lying in Ilya Rozanov's bed at eleven a.m. with Ilya's head between his thighs. "Might be a flu. I'll keep you posted."
"Take care of yourself, Hollander."
"Absolutely," Shane said, and muted the phone just as Ilya's tongue did something that made his back arch off the mattress.
They didn't leave the house for two days.
Forty-eight hours. Shane would remember them later the way he remembered certain games - not as a continuous narrative but as a series of moments, vivid and disconnected, each one seared into his memory with the clarity of a photograph taken at the exact right instant.
The bed, first. Multiple times. The first round after the initial revelation was desperate and clumsy and perfect - both of them too keyed up to be graceful, Shane coming embarrassingly fast with Ilya inside him and Ilya following thirty seconds later. The second round, an hour after, was slower. Ilya on his back, Shane straddling him, and the look on Ilya's face as Shane sank down onto his cock - reverent, disbelieving, his hands gripping Shane's hips like he might vanish - made Shane's chest crack open.
"You are so beautiful," Ilya said, looking up at him. "How are you so beautiful? Is unfair. Should be crime."
"Stop talking and fuck me."
"No. Want to look." His hands slid up Shane's thighs, his stomach, his chest, mapping him with a slow thoroughness that made Shane's skin prickle. "Have imagined this. You on top of me, like this. For years. And real thing..." He shook his head. "Better. So much better than stupid imagination."
Shane rolled his hips, and Ilya's head fell back against the pillow, and whatever else he was going to say dissolved into a groan.
The shower. Shane had stepped in alone, intending to actually wash, and thirty seconds later the glass door opened and Ilya was behind him, pressing him against the tile, the hot water sluicing over both of them. Ilya's mouth on the back of his neck, his cock sliding between Shane's thighs, thick and hard against Shane's perineum.
"Here?" Shane gasped, water running into his mouth.
"Here," Ilya confirmed, and reached for the silicone-based lube he'd apparently stashed on the shower shelf for exactly this purpose. He worked Shane open under the water, two fingers that knew exactly where to press, and then lifted Shane's thigh - just one, bracing his foot against the tile ledge - and pushed in from behind.
The angle was different standing. Deeper, somehow, gravity pulling Ilya's cock against Shane's prostate with every thrust. Shane braced his forearms against the tile and let the water hit his back and took it, his moans echoing off the glass walls, amplified, inescapable.
"All of Boston can hear you," Ilya said against his ear. "Good. Want them to know. Want whole city to know what sounds you make when I fuck you. Especially your teammates. Especially the ones who call you 'squeaky clean.' If they could see their captain now, hm? Taking my cock in shower like is only thing he needs to live."
Shane moaned louder. He couldn't help it.
"Da, like that. Be loud for me. Nobody here but us and hot water and my cock inside you."
Ilya fucked him until Shane's raised leg trembled so badly it nearly buckled, and then caught him - scooped him up like he weighed nothing, Shane's back against the tile, legs locked around Ilya's waist - and finished them both standing, Shane coming between their wet bodies with a sob.
The kitchen. This one was Shane's fault. He'd been making coffee - Ilya's kitchen was a disaster of expensive equipment and no groceries - and he'd bent over to find filters in a lower cabinet, wearing only Ilya's boxers, which were too big and hung low on his hips.
He heard Ilya's bare feet on the tile behind him. Felt hands on his hips. Felt the boxers pulled down.
"I was making coffee."
"Coffee can wait. This cannot." Ilya dropped to his knees behind him, hands spreading Shane's cheeks, and Shane had exactly half a second to register what was about to happen before Ilya's tongue was on him.
"Fuck - Ilya -"
"Shh. Hold counter. Do not move." Ilya's voice was muffled against him, his tongue flat and hot, licking a long wet stripe over Shane's hole. "Wanted to do this since last night. You walk around my kitchen in my boxers with your ass like this and expect me to not eat you for breakfast? Rude, Hollander. Very rude."
Shane's knees hit the cabinet door. He grabbed the counter edge with both hands and held on while Ilya rimmed him with the same devastating thoroughness he brought to everything - long, flat strokes of his tongue, then pointed, pressing in, then circling his rim until Shane was whimpering and pushing back against his face. Ilya ate him out like he was starving for it, like Shane's body was the meal he'd been waiting for, and the sounds he made - wet, hungry, shameless - were filthier than anything Svetlana had ever said to him.
"Taste so good here," Ilya groaned against him, tongue pressing inside. "Could do this for hours. Could eat this ass all day and die happy. You are shaking, solnyshko. Shaking and dripping on my floor." One hand slid around to grip Shane's cock, finding it hard and leaking. "Already so wet for me. Just from my tongue. You are most responsive person I ever touch."
Shane spilled coffee all over the marble counter and didn't notice until much later.
The couch. The hallway. The floor in front of the fireplace, where Ilya laid him out on a rug and took him apart so slowly that Shane cried again - not from overwhelm this time, but from the tenderness of it, from the way Ilya held his face and looked into his eyes while he rocked into him and whispered things in Russian that Shane was beginning to understand. Krasivyy. Beautiful. Mine. You are everything.
And once, against the wall in the upstairs hallway, both of them too desperate to make it back to the bedroom. Shane's legs around Ilya's waist, Ilya's hands under his ass, Shane's back against the plaster, a framed photograph knocked off its hook by the impact. Ilya fucked into him with his full strength, the same power he used on the ice, and Shane took it all, his fingers digging into Ilya's shoulders, his head thrown back, both of them too far gone to be quiet.
In between, they talked.
They talked the way they'd never been able to talk in the handshake line or the penalty box or the thirty seconds of chirping between face-offs. Ilya told Shane about growing up in Moscow, about his mother, about the pressure of being a number-one draft pick in a sport that tolerated exactly zero deviation from its definition of masculinity. Shane told Ilya about Rose, about the toys, about the eleven months of celibacy that had felt like solitary confinement.
"You used toys and pretended they were me?" Ilya said, propped up on one elbow, grinning the shit-eating grin that Shane had hated from across the ice and loved from across a pillow.
"Don't be smug about it."
"Am being very smug about it. Is best thing anyone has ever told me." Ilya pulled him closer, one arm looping around Shane's waist. "For record, I jerked off to your Calvin Klein commercial. Multiple times. Svetlana saw and has never let me forget."
"Oh my god."
"She also showed me Sports Illustrated body issue. Had to leave room."
"Oh my god."
Ilya kissed the back of his neck. "And once, I told her fantasy. About you. In full hockey gear. Helmet, gloves, all of it." His voice dropped, the way it did, going lower and rougher in a way that made Shane's spent cock twitch. "Wanted to drop to knees in tunnel after game and suck you off while still wearing everything. Still sweating. Pull you out and take you down my throat while you still buzzing. Taste you and ice and sweat all at once."
Shane's face was in a pillow. "I'm going to kill Svetlana."
"No, you are going to thank her. We both are."
He called Svetlana on the second day. She picked up on the first ring.
"So?" she said.
"You are insane," Shane said. "You are a dangerous, certifiably insane person, and I am going to buy you a car."
"I have cars."
"I'm going to buy you a bad car. A beige one. An Audi."
Her laugh was so loud he had to hold the phone away from his ear. "So it went well?"
"Svetlana. He's..." Shane looked over at Ilya, who was asleep on the couch with one arm thrown over his face, mouth slightly open, chest rising and falling. He looked like a painting. He looked like every fantasy Shane had tortured himself with since he was eighteen.
"Yeah," Shane said. "It went well."
When they parted, standing in Ilya's doorway, Shane said, "Do you want to do this again?"
Ilya cupped his face with both hands and kissed him - slow, thorough, the kind of kiss that said what a stupid question.
"When is next game in Boston?" Ilya asked.
"Three weeks."
"Three weeks is too long. Will come to Montreal."
"Ilya-"
"One week. Come in one week. And will bring handcuffs."
Shane laughed. It felt like the first real laugh he'd had in years.
***
VII. Ours
It became something that neither of them named.
They met in cities. They planned around game schedules and bye weeks and the occasional "personal day" that Shane's coaching staff stopped questioning because his play was the best it had ever been. They fucked in hotel rooms in New York and Toronto and Vancouver and once, memorably, in a cabin Ilya had rented in the middle of nowhere in Vermont where the nearest neighbour was two miles away and Shane didn't have to be quiet.
Being loud was a revelation.
Shane had spent his entire sexual life being quiet - muffling himself in pillows, biting sheets, swallowing sounds that his body needed to make. With Rose, he'd been silent out of guilt. With Svetlana, he'd been restrained out of habit. But in Vermont, with a snowstorm howling outside and Ilya's mouth between his legs, Shane screamed, and the sound bounced off the log walls and came back to him and it sounded like freedom.
"Again," Ilya said, grinning up at him, lips wet. "Louder. Want bears to hear."
"There aren't bears in - fuck - in February-"
"Then moose. Want moose to be jealous."
Shane laughed and then Ilya did something with his tongue and the laugh became a howl and the moose, wherever they were, probably filed a noise complaint.
They weren't exclusive. Ilya was Ilya - charming and gorgeous and bisexual with the discretion of a man who understood the stakes and the appetites of a man who enjoyed his life. Shane knew this and tried not to think about it, and mostly succeeded, except on nights when he was alone in his apartment with his phone and the terrifying vulnerability of caring about someone who might, at that exact moment, be underneath someone else.
But when they were together, it was theirs. Only theirs.
Shane learned Ilya's body the way he learned game film: obsessively, thoroughly, catalogueing every tell. The spot behind Ilya's ear that made his breath catch. The way his abs contracted when Shane ran his tongue along the cut of his hip. The specific angle and depth that made Ilya's composure shatter, his head falling back, his Russian spilling out in a stream of words Shane was slowly learning to translate.
He learned to suck cock. This, too, was a revelation.
The first time, in the hotel room after their second meeting, Shane had been nervous enough to shake. Ilya sat on the edge of the bed, patient, his hands resting on his own thighs instead of Shane's head - giving him space, giving him control. Shane knelt between his legs and looked at Ilya's cock, thick and hard and curving slightly left, and thought: I have wanted this my entire adult life and I was too afraid to admit it.
He was clumsy at first. Too much teeth. Wrong angle. His jaw ached after three minutes and his technique was nonexistent. But Ilya guided him with his voice - slower, use tongue more, flatten against underside, da, like that, now suck, harder, khorosho, fuck, just like that - and Shane, who had been following coaches' instructions since he was five years old, followed these with the same dedication.
By the fourth meeting, he could take Ilya to the back of his throat.
By the sixth, he could make Ilya come in under five minutes.
By the eighth, Ilya told him, breathless and wrecked, that Shane gave the best head he'd ever received, from any gender, and Shane felt a spike of pride so intense it made him dizzy. He had found the one thing he was competitive about that had nothing to do with hockey.
And Ilya learned Shane. Learned that praise undid him faster than anything physical. Learned that good boy in that specific register - low, rumbling, delivered against the back of Shane's neck - made his whole body go liquid. Learned that Shane needed to be held afterward, needed the weight of another body against his, needed to be told that he was wanted and good and enough. Learned that Shane's orgasms were not just physical events but emotional breakthroughs, each one cracking the shell of shame a little thinner.
"You are enough," Ilya told him, in the dark, in a hotel in Dallas, with Shane's head on his chest. Shane had just come apart beneath him - a long, shuddering orgasm that had left him trembling and silent, curled into Ilya's side with his face pressed to the warm skin. "More than enough. Have always been enough."
Shane pressed his face into Ilya's skin and tried not to cry. Failed.
Ilya held him tighter. Didn't comment on the tears. Just pressed his mouth to the top of Shane's head and breathed him in.
"Am going to say something and you will maybe hate it," Ilya murmured into his hair.
"What?"
"You are bravest person I know."
Shane laughed, waterlogged. "I'm not brave. I've been hiding for ten years."
"Hiding is not cowardice. Hiding is survival. And now you are here, in my bed, and every time you come here you are choosing not to hide. That is bravery, Shane. Not absence of fear. Choice to show up anyway."
Shane's throat closed. He pressed closer. Ilya's heartbeat was steady against his ear - slow, strong, the resting heart rate of an elite athlete. It was the most comforting sound in the world.
Two years. Two years of hotel rooms and stolen nights and the slow, terrifying thaw of a man who had been frozen his entire life. Shane's game improved. His anxiety didn't disappear, but it shifted - from the all-consuming dread of a man hiding his entire self to the manageable worry of a man hiding one very specific, very important thing.
Montreal won the Cup again. Shane's second. He lifted it over his head and looked for Ilya in the crowd, knowing he wouldn't be there, and wanting him there with an ache that nearly brought him to his knees on the ice.
Then Scott Hunter kissed his boyfriend on national television a year later and the world didn't end.
***
The next morning, Shane opened the door to his Montreal apartment and found Ilya Rozanov standing in the hallway.
He was wearing a wrinkled t-shirt and jeans and he looked like he'd driven through the night. His hair was a mess. His eyes were wide and bright and desperate. He hadn't shaved. He was the most beautiful thing Shane had ever seen.
"Shane," he said.
"Ilya, what are you-"
"I want to be your boyfriend."
Shane blinked.
"I know we said not exclusive. I know we said we are just - whatever this is. I know you are scared and I know you are not ready for world to know and I do not care about any of that." He was talking fast, the way he did when he was nervous, his accent thickening until the words tumbled over each other. "Want to be yours. Want you to be mine. Want to fall asleep with you and wake up with you and not have to check schedule to know when I will see you next." He swallowed, his Adam's apple bobbing. "Watched Scott Hunter last night. Watched him kiss that man on national television and crowd cheered and I sat on couch alone and I thought: I want that. Want that with Shane. And if he will not have me I will drive home and be miserable but at least I will have said it."
His hands were shaking. Ilya Rozanov, who never shook, whose hands were steady when he held a stick and steady when he held Shane's body and steady when he fought men twice his size on the ice, was shaking.
"Am in love with you, Shane. Have been in love with you for years. Maybe since first time we met in World Juniors. Definitely since Calvin Klein thing. And am tired of pretending this is casual when is most important thing in my life."
Shane pulled him inside by his wrinkled t-shirt and kissed him so hard they stumbled into the entryway table and knocked over a lamp. The lamp shattered. Neither of them looked.
"Yes," Shane said against his mouth. "Yes, yes, yes."
"Yes to boyfriend or yes to the kissing?"
"Yes to everything. Yes to all of it. Yes to you, Ilya, yes."
Ilya made a sound against his mouth - a broken, relieved, half-laughing exhale - and lifted Shane off his feet and carried him to the bedroom, and Shane let him, wrapped around him like he'd never let go.
The sex that followed was different from every time before. Not rougher or gentler - closer. Ilya's body covering his, their foreheads pressed together, eyes open, seeing each other. No hiding. No performing. Just Shane and Ilya, skin to skin, breath to breath, and for the first time in Shane's life, the person inside him was the person he wanted there, and the person he wanted to be was the person he was.
"Ya lyublyu tebya," Ilya said, buried inside him, his voice breaking on the syllables. "Love you. Have been so stupid. So many years of stupid."
"We've both been so stupid," Shane whispered.
"Most stupid. Olympic-level stupid. World-record stupid."
Shane laughed and Ilya kissed the laugh off his mouth and rocked into him, slow and deep, and Shane held on and let himself be held and thought: this is what it's supposed to feel like. This is what all of it was for.
Every toy. Every lonely night. Every fantasy he'd been ashamed of. Every time he'd closed his eyes and pretended the silicone was warm and alive and Russian. It had all been leading here, to this bed, to this man, to the sound of his own name in Ilya's mouth like it was the only word in any language that mattered.
***
VIII. Free
The Next year.
The Cup Final, Game Seven. Boston versus Minnesota.
Shane sat in the private box at TD Garden with Svetlana on his left and the series on the line and his heart in his throat. Below them, on the ice, Ilya Rozanov - Captain Rozanov, wearing the C for his second Cup final - was about to play the most important game of his career.
"He looks tight," Shane said, watching Ilya's warm-up. "He is half-step slow. He needs to-"
"Open his hips on the pivot," Svetlana said, not looking up from her phone. "And his stick handling through the neutral zone has been lazy all series. Also his faceoff win percentage is down eight points from the regular season, which tells me his timing is off, probably fatigue."
Shane stared at her.
Svetlana looked up. Grinned. "What?"
"How long have you known about hockey? I know your dad was a legend but - "
"Known about hockey?" She put her phone down and turned to face him fully, and the grin on her face was the most dangerous version of it, the one that usually preceded Shane learning something that rearranged his entire understanding of reality. "Shane, honey, I played growing up. Competitively. My coach tried to recruit me for the national women's team. I can still dangle better than half the guys on Ilya's roster and I have a slapshot that would make your teammates cry. I know more about hockey than you know about cars, which-" she raised a finger "-is still nothing, by the way."
"You - all this time - you knew -"
"I knew who you were from the moment you matched with me on the app, Shane." She shrugged, picking her phone back up. "But I wasn't going to scare you off. You were so fragile, and so pretty, and you needed someone who wouldn't push. So I didn't push. I just... helped."
"Helped? You engineered my entire sexual awakening and then set me up with my rival!"
"And?" She sipped her wine. "How's that working out for you?"
Shane opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked down at the ice, where Ilya was skating hard through a drill, his body cutting through the space with the kind of ferocious grace that still, after all these years, made Shane's breath catch.
"Fine," Shane muttered. "It's working out fine."
"Fine, he says. Three years of the best sex of his life, a boyfriend who looks at him like he hung the moon, and his parents adopting Ilya. Fine."
The game started.
It was brutal. Minnesota played like they had nothing to lose, because they didn't - this was their first Finals appearance in twenty years, and they threw everything at Boston with the ferocity of men who might not get another shot. The score seesawed: 1-0 Minnesota, 1-1, 2-1 Boston, 2-2.
Ilya played possessed. Two assists. A penalty kill that should have broken Boston but instead broke Minnesota's spirit when Ilya - shorthanded, exhausted, with blood running from a cut above his eyebrow - stole the puck at the blue line and went coast-to-coast for a goal that brought twenty thousand people to their feet.
"THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT!" Svetlana screamed, on her feet, wine sloshing. "OPEN THE HIPS, ROZANOV! THAT'S MY BOY!"
Shane laughed. He couldn't stop laughing.
Final score: Boston 4, Minnesota 3. Ilya Rozanov: two goals, one assist, first star.
The Cup came out. The arena shook. Ilya lifted it over his head - second time as captain - and the roar was loud enough to rattle the glass of the private box.
Shane watched him skate the Cup around the ice, grinning, crying, screaming at the crowd, and he thought about the first time Ilya had held him in that bedroom in Brookline, you are safe here, and the blindfold and the candles and the terrified man in white lace, and the distance between that man and the one sitting here now, watching his boyfriend win the Stanley Cup, felt like an ocean he'd somehow swum across without drowning.
Svetlana elbowed him. Hard.
"It's time," she said.
Shane looked at her. His heart was pounding. They'd discussed this - he and Ilya, for months. With mom. With their agents. Everything was in place.
"Go," Svetlana said, and her eyes were bright with tears she'd deny later. "Go get your man, Hollander."
Shane stood. His legs were shaking. He walked out of the private box and down the corridor and through the tunnel, and the closer he got to the ice, the louder the roar became, until it was inside him, inside his bones.
He stepped onto the ice.
Twenty thousand people saw Shane Hollander come out of the tunnel.
The cameras found him immediately. The broadcast cut to him - Shane Hollander, Montreal Voyageurs captain, walking across the ice at TD Garden in street clothes with no reason to be there except one.
Ilya saw him.
The Cup was on the ice behind him, forgotten. His teammates were screaming, celebrating, spraying champagne. But Ilya saw Shane, and everything else fell away from his face, and he opened his arms.
Shane walked toward him. Then jogged. Then ran.
Ilya caught him. Lifted him off the ice, arms locked around Shane's waist, spinning him once, both of them laughing. Shane's feet dangled above the ice and Ilya's face was against his neck and the arena had gone quiet with confusion, twenty thousand people trying to understand what they were seeing.
Ilya set him down. Cupped his face. The cameras were on them. The world was watching.
"Dinosaur Scott Hunter kissed boyfriend on national television," Ilya said, loud enough for the nearest microphone to catch it, grinning his widest, most infuriating, most beloved grin. "Am going to one-up him."
And then Ilya Rozanov kissed Shane Hollander on the ice at TD Garden, with the Stanley Cup behind them and twenty thousand people watching and the broadcast going to every screen in North America.
Shane kissed him back.
Shane was finally free.
After all the years - the locked closets and the taped-shut boxes, the nights alone with toys and fantasies, the terror and the shame and the long, winding road through Rose's kindness and Svetlana's scheming and Ilya's arms - Shane Hollander was standing on the ice with his hand in his boyfriend's hair and his heart beating for the first time without a cage around it.
He'd spent his whole life learning how to perform.
This was the first thing he'd ever done that was real.
***
Coda
At the Hollander - Rozanov wedding, Svetlana and Rose get into a healthy argument.
"I made him realise that he may be into men! And that he would like bottoming!" Rose says indignantly, 5 vodka shots in.
"I figured out he was hot for Ilya and set them up! Now they're married!", Svetlana slurs a bit.
They go on for a while till they mutually agree to settle this with the grooms.
Shane is drunk, happy and loopy - and Ilya is kissing him with so much sloppy tongue like a horny drunk teenager it's hilarious.
"WHO GAVE YOU THE GREATEST GIFT IDIOTS!" The ladies roar, pulling them apart.
"None of you gave anything," Ilya replies testily. "My Shane gave you the most perfect gift - his tight, pink hole. You were lucky to ever taste that hole. Now you will never come near my Shane's hole."
Shane giggles, lifting his head. "Ilya loves my hole so much he is going to put it on the Hollywood billboard! And write you can't touch this."
"That's factually incorrect. I, Rose landry, Oscar winner have -"
"But if I have anyone to thank - it is the HiPro's 10 inch bubblegum pink attachment for preparing my hole for Ilya's big dick." Shane says dreamily.
Sveta whoops. Rose huffs in anger.
"Thank you for teaching my husband how to take my cock. Now shoo!"
Rose and Sveta huff again as the two get back to sloppy tongue fucking.
The girls walk away and Rose tentatively asks..."10 inches - that's crazy and sounds so unrealistic - is he that-"
Sveta laughs. "He's nine and something. But even if he wasn't - Shane Hollander is a grade A cockslut who will absolutely take on bigger challenges. He thrives on competition. Now Ilya will be pissed he can't take a 10 incher yet."
Rose licks her lips. "So, ahem, you have this machine at your home? I could come...to get a fair opinion if something like this is worth it."
Sveta's grin turns sly. "I could give you several live demonstrations. You could try out each attachment."
Rose winks. "I would love to. I'm free this weekend."
Svetlana leans in and kisses Rose's cheek and whispers into her ear.
"I'll make sure my house is flooded with your squirts and cum then this weekend. And see what's the thickest your tight cunt can take. Maybe even fit two inside you."
"Fuck."
"That's what we're gonna do."
Sveta leans in to kiss Rose's lips. The idiots got their happy ending. And thanks to them, she and Rose are gonna get many of them.
fin.