Chapter 3: Ostavaysya
For one long second, neither of them moved. Shane lay pinned under a hundred and ninety pounds of naked Russian and listened to his best friend rattle the door handle, and his entire life, every careful year of it, flashed before his eyes in the form of a sports-network chyron.
Then the training kicked in. Seven years of rules had made him fast.
"Bathroom," he hissed, shoving.
Ilya rolled off the bed, gloriously unbothered, and strolled toward the bathroom like he had all the time in the world. He stopped in the doorway to pick up his jeans. Then he stopped again to pick up his hoodie. Shane was going to kill him.
"Hollander! I can hear you in there!"
"One second!" Shane grabbed the hotel bathrobe off the hook, got one arm in it, got the other arm in the wrong hole, gave up and wrapped it around himself like a towel. He kicked the condom wrapper under the bed. He looked at the bed itself, which looked like a crime scene, and threw the duvet over it, which helped nothing. Then he flipped the security latch and opened the door four inches.
Hayden filled the gap. He had a beer in one hand and a plastic room key in the other, and his tie was knotted around his head like a sweatband.
"You," he said, "are not at the bar."
"I fell asleep."
"You're sweaty."
"I had a nightmare."
Hayden narrowed his eyes. He leaned to one side, trying to look past Shane into the room. Shane leaned with him. Hayden leaned the other way. Shane leaned the other way.
"Why is your hair like that?"
"I was asleep, Hayden."
"Why is there a Raiders hat on your floor?"
Shane looked down. Ilya's black cap lay in the middle of the carpet like a dead bird. He'd missed it. Seven years of rules and he'd missed a hat.
"A fan gave it to me," he said. "In the elevator. Big guy. Danny. He was very emotional."
"A Raiders fan gave you a Raiders hat."
"He said I'd earned it."
Hayden studied him for a long moment with the terrible clarity that sometimes comes over very drunk men. Shane held his breath. Behind him, faintly, from the bathroom, he heard something that might have been a snort.
"You're smiling," Hayden said finally.
"What?"
"You're smiling. Right now. You never smile. You get all," he waved his beer at Shane's whole face, "pinchy. After games. Even when we win. And you're just standing there in a bathrobe you put on wrong, smiling like a moron." His own face went soft and stupid. "That's good, bud. You should do that more."
Shane didn't know what to say to that. So he said, "Breakfast. I'll buy you breakfast. Eight o'clock. Go to bed."
"Pancakes?"
"Whatever you want."
"Legend," said Hayden, and patted the door like it was Shane's cheek, and wandered off down the hall singing the Metros goal song badly in two different keys.
Shane shut the door. He put his forehead against it.
"Danny," said a voice from the bathroom, shaking with laughter. "He was very emotional."
"I hate you."
"He said you'd earned it."
"I will drown you in that bathtub, Rozanov."
Ilya came out. He'd put on the jeans and nothing else, and they were unbuttoned, and he was leaning against the bathroom doorframe with the lamplight on his chest and the cut on his eyebrow gleaming, grinning so wide it changed the whole shape of his face. Shane looked at him and felt the floor go somewhere.
"You should have seen yourself," Ilya said. "Bathrobe on backward. 'I had a nightmare.' Very convincing. Oscar performance."
"He's going to remember the hat."
"He is not going to remember his own name." Ilya crossed the room. Stopped in front of him. Reached out, and with a care that didn't match his voice at all, untangled the bathrobe sleeve from Shane's arm and set it right. "There. Now you look like a legend."
Shane caught his wrist.
"You were going to tell me something," he said. "Before."
Ilya's grin faded, not all at once. It went the way the noise had gone out of the building after the goal: a sudden pressure drop.
"It was nothing."
"It wasn't nothing. You said my name."
"I say your name all the time. Hollander. Hollander. Very annoying name."
"Ilya."
He looked away, at the window, at the black water. For a while Shane thought he wasn't going to answer. Shane had learned, over seven years, that you couldn't push him. You just had to stand there and be the wall he could lean on, or bounce off of, or whatever he needed that day.
"When the puck went in," Ilya said at last, "I was standing at the blue line, and I thought, I have just lost everything. My season. My building. Every newspaper in Boston will have my face on it tomorrow with the word choke." He breathed out through his nose. "And then I watched them pile on you. And I thought: good. Good for him. He wanted it so much. Look at him." He turned back. His eyes were wet and furious. "I was happy for you, Shane. In my own building. With my own season dead on the ice. I have never hated anything so much in my life as being happy for you."
Shane didn't think about it. He pulled him in by the wrist and kissed him, and Ilya made a low, wrecked sound into his mouth and kissed him back like he was drowning.
It was different, the second time. It usually was. The first time after a long gap was for getting the want out of their bodies, fast and greedy, as if one of them might be traded in the night. The second time was slower. The second time was where Shane always got into trouble, because the second time was where he started to believe it.
They lay facing each other in the half-dark, legs tangled, the duvet kicked to the floor. Ilya's hand moved along his side, down his hip, up again, unhurried, like he was learning him. Shane kissed him and kept kissing him, lazy and deep, until the heat came back up through both of them like a tide.
"Can I," Shane said, against his mouth. His hand on the curve of Ilya's ass. "Tonight. Can I?"
Ilya's breath caught. He rolled onto his back and pulled Shane over him, and his voice was rough. "Yes. Yes, Hollander. You won. Take your prize."
"Don't," Shane said. "Don't make it a joke."
Ilya looked up at him for a long moment. Then he reached up and touched Shane's cheek, very lightly, with the backs of his fingers.
"Okay," he said. "No joke. I want you. Come here."
Shane took his time. He'd always been better at patience than Ilya. He opened him slowly, kissing his stomach, his chest, the hinge of his jaw, watching Ilya's head tip back on the pillow and his hands knot in the sheets. When Ilya finally said now in that cracked, impatient voice, Shane rolled on a condom and slicked himself and pushed in by degrees, so slowly that Ilya swore at him in two languages, and then stopped swearing, and just held on.
They moved together without any hurry. Shane kept his eyes open. So did Ilya. That was new; usually one of them looked away, at the ceiling, at the wall, at anything that wasn't the other man's face. Not tonight. Tonight Ilya held his gaze the whole time, his hand spread on the back of Shane's neck, his breath coming shorter and shorter, his lips parted. Shane rocked into him deep and slow and watched every stroke land in his face.
"Shane," Ilya breathed. "Shane. Blyad. Don't stop."
"I won't."
Ilya's eyes fluttered half-shut. His hand tightened on Shane's neck. And he murmured something, low and soft and in Russian, the way he always did near the end, the way he'd done for seven years, safe in the certainty that Shane Hollander, who had scraped through the mandatory French and never gone near Russian, could not understand a word of it.
"Ty mne nuzhen."
Shane stilled. He leaned down, until his mouth was right next to Ilya's ear.
"Ty mne tozhe nuzhen," he said. Badly. The vowels were all wrong. He'd practiced it in the car.
Ilya's eyes flew open.
He stared up at Shane like Shane had just grown a second head. His mouth moved and nothing came out. Shane felt his whole body go rigid under him, then tremble, then he grabbed Shane's face in both hands.
"What," Ilya said. "What did you, how do you, since when do you speak—"
"Since February," Shane said. His face was burning. "There's an app. There's an owl. It's very aggressive. It sends me notifications if I miss a day." He swallowed. "I wanted to know what you were saying. All those times. I needed to know."
Ilya made a sound that Shane had never heard from him before, part laugh and part something that wasn't a laugh at all. He pulled Shane down and kissed him, hard, almost angry, and then wrapped both legs around him and said, against his mouth, in English, "Move. Move, you terrible man. Please."
Shane moved. Ilya came with his face pressed into Shane's shoulder, shaking all over, and Shane went over the edge a heartbeat later with Ilya's name in his mouth and Ilya's hands holding his face like something breakable.
Afterward Ilya didn't get up. He didn't reach for his jeans or check his phone or start looking for his cap. He lay on his side with his head on Shane's chest, his breath slowing, and traced a lazy pattern on Shane's stomach with one finger, and every so often he laughed under his breath, softly, to himself.
"An owl," he said.
"Shut up."
"Shane Hollander. Captain of my nightmares. Doing Duolingo in the team bus."
"I use headphones."
Ilya laughed again. Then he went quiet, and after a while he said, without lifting his head, "What else did you learn?"
Shane thought about it. He thought about the rules. Never two nights in a row. Never in the team hotel. Never stay.
"Ostavaysya," he said carefully. Stay.
The finger on his stomach stopped.
"And in July," Shane went on, before he could lose his nerve, "I have the cottage. On the lake. Nobody comes out there. Nobody at all. You could come. For a week. For longer. I don't care about the rules."
Ilya lifted his head. In the light from the harbor his face was naked in a way Shane had never seen it, not even in the dark.
"You made half those rules," Ilya said.
"You made the other half."
A long pause. Then Ilya put his head back down on Shane's chest and pulled the sheet up over both of them, and settled in like a man who'd decided something.
"Okay," he said. "I stay."
Shane lay awake for a long time after Ilya fell asleep, listening to him breathe, watching the lights on the water, letting himself believe it.
He didn't check his phone until six-forty. By then it had eighty-one notifications. The top one was from Hayden, and it was a link, and the link was to a photo posted just after one in the morning by someone called @DannyBoyRaiders, with the caption heartbroken but this guy is a CLASS ACT and it already had two hundred thousand likes.
Two huge men in Rozanov jerseys. Shane in the middle, smiling his terrible smile. And behind them, in the mirrored wall of the elevator, perfectly reflected, a man in a gray hoodie and a black cap, holding up the phone, biting down on a grin.
Hayden's text, underneath, said only: buddy is that who i think it is