Chapter 3: The Last Time
The water in the team hotel was scalding, but Misha stood under it until his skin burned pink. Steam fogged the glass enclosure, hiding the tight press of his fists against the tile. He’d been doing this for months. After every training session, after every dream that featured Ilia’s cold hands, he’d stand under the punishing spray and try to wash the feeling away. The feeling of being emptied out and left on the floor.
He’d sworn, sobbing into the drain after the Grand Prix Final, that it was over. That he would build a spine from the shattered pieces of his pride. He trained harder. He landed quads until his ankles screamed. He avoided Ilia at the rink, keeping his eyes on the ice, on his coach, on anything but that platinum hair and effortless grace.
It worked. For whole days, sometimes.
Then came the short program at Worlds. Misha skated clean, a personal best. The roar of the crowd was a physical thing, a wave of heat that lifted him. For three glorious minutes, he was not pathetic. He was electric. He took his bows, breathless, a real smile touching his lips for the first time in weeks.
As he stepped through the kiss-and-cry, his skin buzzing with adrenaline, he felt the weight of a stare. He looked up.
Ilia was leaning against a sponsor banner, already changed, his gear bag slung over one shoulder. He hadn’t skated yet. His expression was unreadable. Then, slowly, deliberately, he formed the words with his mouth, soundless in the arena’s din. Come find me.
Three words. That was all it took. The resolve Misha had painstakingly glued together over months dissolved like sugar in rain. The high of his performance curdled, replaced by a familiar, sickening throb of want. He gave a tiny, almost imperceptible nod, a traitor’s signal.
He waited until midnight, pacing his own sterile room, arguing with the ghost of his better self. He lost. He always lost.
The walk to Ilia’s room was a funeral march. He knocked, the sound timid against the heavy door.
It opened almost immediately. Ilia stood there, shirtless, a towel draped around his neck. His sweatpants sat low on his hips, the sharp V of his torso leading down. He smelled of shampoo and something colder, like mint. He looked Misha up and down, a smirk playing on his lips.
“Took you long enough,” he said, his voice a low rasp. He didn’t step aside. He reached out, fingers curling into the collar of Misha’s hoodie, and yanked him forward. Misha stumbled over the threshold. The door clicked shut behind him.
The room was a copy of the last one, maybe every hotel room Ilia ever booked. Monochrome. Ordered. A cold showcase. The bed was perfectly made, a brutalist sculpture of linen and pillows.
“I knew you’d come,” Ilia said, not letting go of his collar. He pushed Misha back against the closed door, the impact jarring. “You skated well today. It almost made you look like you had a soul. We both know better, don’t we?”
Misha couldn’t speak. He just looked at Ilia’s mouth.
Ilia’s hands went to the waist of Misha’s sweatpants, shoving them down with rough impatience. “These are in the way.” He dropped to his knees, and for a wild second, Misha’s heart lurched—but Ilia wasn’t there to please him. He grabbed Misha’s ankles, one after the other, forcing him to step out of the pooled fabric. He left him standing there, exposed and shivering in just his hoodie.
“Over there,” Ilia nodded toward a low, leather armchair by the window.
Misha moved. The leather was cold and sticky against his thighs as he bent over it, his upper body pressing into the seat, his ass in the air. A position of absolute offering. He heard the rustle of Ilia’s sweatpants being pushed down, the click of a cap.
Ilia didn’t prepare him with his fingers this time. He just spat, a wet, crude sound, and pressed the cold, slick head of his cock against him. “You’re always ready for me, aren’t you?” he muttered. “Always open.”
He pushed in. It was a brutal, tearing entrance, too dry, too fast. Misha cried out, a sharp, pained sound that echoed in the quiet room.
Ilia’s hand clamped over his mouth from behind, hard, the heel of his palm grinding against his teeth. “Quiet,” he hissed into his ear, not stopping his relentless forward press until he was fully seated, a burning, splitting weight inside him. “You don’t get to make noise. You take it. That’s all.”
He began to fuck him in earnest, short, punishing drives that rocked Misha against the chair. Each thrust was a shock to the system. The leather squeaked under their weight. Ilia’s hand stayed plastered over Misha’s mouth, muffling his ragged breaths, his choked whimpers. Saliva gathered, hot and shameful, against Ilia’s palm.
“This is what you needed, wasn’t it?” Ilia grunted, his rhythm becoming harder, more erratic. “All that proud skating today. It was just foreplay. This is your real performance. Being my fucking hole.”
Misha’s eyes swam with tears of pain and unwanted, rising pleasure. His body, traitorously, began to adjust, to welcome the brutal friction. He was horrifically hard, his own cock trapped and leaking against the cold leather.
Ilia leaned over him, his chest a damp press against Misha’s back, his mouth now at Misha’s ear. His breath was hot. “You’re even tighter when I hurt you a little. You like that, you sick fuck?”
Misha couldn’t nod. He moaned into the crushing hand.
“I can feel you,” Ilia whispered, the cruelty softening into something like awe, but it was the awe of a man admiring a well-made tool. “Clenching around me. Pathetic. You’re gonna come just from this, aren’t you? From being used like a rag.”
It was true. The degradation, the painful stretch, Ilia’s voice in his ear—it was coiling a devastating tension in Misha’s gut. He was teetering on the edge, his hips pushing back helplessly to meet Ilia’s thrusts.
Ilia sensed it. He snapped his hips forward, deep, and kept his pelvis grinding there. “Come on, then,” he commanded, his voice raw. “Come for me. Show me how much you love being nothing.”
The permission, wrapped in contempt, shattered Misha completely. His orgasm ripped through him, violent and silent save for the ragged vibration in his throat against Ilia’s hand. He spasmed, clenching hard around Ilia, who let out a sharp, punched-out groan.
“Fuck,” Ilia hissed. “Fuck, that’s it.” He drove into him three more times, hard and final, and Misha felt the hot, internal pulse of Ilia’s release.
For a moment, they stayed locked like that, Ilia’s weight heavy on him, the only sounds their harsh breathing. Ilia’s hand slowly loosened from Misha’s mouth, leaving a wet imprint. He pulled out abruptly.
The emptiness was instant, a cold, aching void. Misha slumped over the chair, boneless, spent. He felt Ilia’s come beginning to trickle down his thigh.
Ilia stepped back. Misha heard the soft tread of his feet on the carpet, the sound of him pulling up his sweatpants. He didn’t look back.
“Clean yourself up in the bathroom,” Ilia said, his voice already distant, flat. “Don’t leave a mess.”
Misha didn’t move. He listened to Ilia move around the room, the clink of a glass, the rustle of papers—probably his program notes.
Then Ilia spoke again, from across the room. “This is the last time.”
Misha’s breath hitched. He turned his head, cheek against the cold leather.
Ilia was looking out the window, his profile sharp and uninterested. “You’re getting too attached. It’s written all over your fucking face every time you look at me. It’s boring.” He finally glanced over, his blue eyes like chips of glacier ice. “After this season. We’re done.”
The words landed with the finality of a guillotine. Misha knew they were true. He knew Ilia saw the desperate love he tried to hide. He knew it disgusted him. A sob welled up in his chest, but he choked it back, swallowing the salt and bile.
He pushed himself upright, his body protesting. He didn’t look at Ilia as he shuffled to the bathroom. He used a wad of toilet paper to clean himself, the act mechanical and grim. He splashed water on his face, avoiding his own hollow-eyed reflection in the mirror.
When he came out, Ilia was in bed, the lights off, the sheets pulled up to his waist. He was on his phone, the blue glow illuminating his impassive face. He didn’t acknowledge Misha’s presence.
Misha found his sweatpants, pulled them on with trembling hands. He stood for a moment in the dark room, a ghost already. Ilia didn’t tell him to leave. He didn’t have to.
The walk back to his own room was a numb trance. The hotel corridor was endless, a tunnel of patterned carpet and identical doors. He let himself in, the silence of his own space a palpable thing.
He didn’t cry. He sat on the edge of his bed, in the dark, and replayed the words. This is the last time. We’re done.
He knew he would go back. Before the season ended, before Ilia made it official, he would find an excuse, a look, a moment of weakness. He would knock on the door. And Ilia, because he was convenient and willing and there, would let him in.
The certainty of this cycle, more than Ilia’s cruelty, was what finally broke him. He curled onto his side, pulling the blanket over his head, and wept silently into the pillow. He wept for the man who would return, hungry for scraps from a table that would soon be deliberately overturned. He wept because even now, aching and empty, the only thing he truly feared was the silence that would come when Ilia stopped wanting to use him at all.