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Shane didn’t think it was a mistake at first. He thought it was nice his dad had gotten Ilya a little present to open on Christmas Day, their first they got to spend together as a real couple, I-love-you’s and all.
It was just that, in hindsight, he should have thought of the consequences. But then again, Shane had never been very good at anticipating any mayhem that came in the form of Ilya Rozanov, so why he thought he should have been able to at Christmas was beyond him.
“Oh,” Ilya said when he opened the gift bag and peeked inside. “A book?”
Shane’s dad cleared his throat. “Uh, yeah.” He gestured towards the gift in a vague ta-da. “They’re puns. And jokes, but they’re all hockey-related? It’s in English and I thought it would be good for learning, or, y’know…” He trailed off, looking like he was regretting every life choice bringing him to this moment and Shane winced in sympathetic awkwardness.
But Ilya, being Ilya, took the whole thing in stride. “I love jokes,” he said, smiling in that wide, open way that was new to Shane and familiar at the same time and that made him want to take Ilya’s face between his hands and squish it for how cute he was. “They will help me learn, yes? Help me understand cultural contexts and stuff?”
Shane felt like his flesh was melting off his bones from loving this man so much. Only he could say things like ‘cultural contexts and stuff’ in a heavy Russian accent and look both like a giddy little kid and a sex-god while doing it.
Which, ew. No.
Shaking off the disturbing thought, Shane smiled as Ilya began leafing through the thin book, mouthing words and grinning when he got one of the jokes. Shane saw his mom give his dad a smile and Shane settled a little bit more securely back into his skin. This was fine, he decided. Maybe even something more than that.
He really should have known better.
„Hey, Shane?“ Ilya said the next morning, looking all kinds of sleep-soft and rumpled in his new pajamas. It had tiny loons on it (and moose and bears, but those weren’t important) and the top was a size too small for him, which may have been intentional on Shane’s part.
“Hm?” Shane took a sip of coffee, enjoying the view and pushing Ilya’s cup his way, doctored just the way he liked it.
Ilya grinned, blond locks flopping into his eyes as he ducked his head and looked at him from under his lashes. “Is that a puck in your pocket-“
Oh, no, Shane thought.
“-or are you just happy to see me?”
There was no way, not one in the entire multiverse of existence, that this could even remotely resemble being sexy. It was a stupid pun, the stupidest, laziest – it wasn’t even funny, was the thing, and he had heard variations of it his whole life and had never found it funny or charming or cute or arousing. Never ever. Like, ever.
So, faced with it now, said in a low, raspy voice by his buff hockey-pro boyfriend, Shane did the only thing he could do. He blushed first, and then he got hard.
Ilya, who by now was some sort of expert in pushing Shane into ill-advised and odd arousal, but was apparently not yet fully aware of this odd superpower, looked first at his burning face and then he glanced down. Shane watched as Ilya’s eyebrows climbed up to his hairline, as his grin got sharper and more direct, and with a sinking feeling, he realized what a grave mistake he’d just made.
He didn’t regret it right away, not when Ilya kissed him, open-mouthed and filthy, right hand already sliding into Shane’s pants while his left gripped his waist in that specific way that turned Shane’s spine into liquid. When he gasped into Ilya’s mouth, stars dancing beneath his closed eyelids as heat and love and yes-yes-yes rushed through him, he had absolutely zero regrets about how this morning had gone.
Those would come later.
Specifically, they came in the exact moment Shane set his stick on the ice next to Ilya’s, his head coming up to meet his boyfriend’s eyes for their first face-off of the new year.
“Ah, Hollander,” Ilya said around a shit-eating grin. “I will call you Titanic from now on, I have decided.”
“Shut up, Rozanov,” Shane said, on reflex.
The ref was getting the puck ready to be dropped. Shane crouched lower, saw Ilya doing the same.
“Want to know why?”
Shane didn’t answer, eyes glued to the puck.
“Because,” Ilya said, his stick nudging Shane’s, “you look pretty good – until you hit the ice.”
The puck dropped and they both exploded into action. Though Shane, having been blindsided by his boyfriend’s sheer and utter audacity, was a fraction of a second too slow. Ilya won the face-off and Shane, he felt, was losing at life.
„I hate his fucking…“ Hayden gestured as if trying to encompass a whole being, an undertaking complicated by the fact that he was trying to take his jersey off at the same time. “Everything. I hate his everything, ugh.”
Shane, knowing where his best friend was coming from but also unfortunately being helplessly enamored with the subject of his ire, nodded. “Yeah,” he agreed, agreeingly.
Hayden glowered at him. “’Yeah’,” he repeated in his exaggerated Shane-voice. “’Yeah’? Really? That’s all you have to say about Ilya fucking Rozanov, the fucking Captain of the fucking Boston Raiders telling fucking hockey jokes on the ice like it’s his fucking day job?”
“About that swear jar-“ Shane started to say.
“Fuck the swear jar!” Hayden interrupted, eyes aglow with outrage. “Wayne Regretsky, Shane. Wayne. Regretsky. That has to count as mental cruelty. Dude should get suspended for something like that.”
Shane frowned, murmuring ‘Wayne Regretsky’ under his breath. “I don’t get it,” he admitted then.
“Jokes that are so obvious they’re painful for 100, Alex,” JJ chimed in, leaning over Shane so that their naked, sweaty skin stuck together. Shane grimaced, but dutifully waited for JJ to continue. “The question is, what do you call a hockey player who regrets his life choices.”
Ah. That was… Shane pulled a face. Extraordinarily stupid, he had to admit. But still… “Did he get the puck?” He asked, pulling back from JJ and grabbing his towel.
“Huh?” Hayden asked back, seemingly still too indignant to understand simple questions.
“Rozanov,” Shane clarified. “Did he take the puck off you with the joke?”
Hayden, to his credit, didn’t even try to lie. “Yes,” he admitted, shame-faced.
“Then maybe you should work on that,” Shane said, made his best I-am-a-serious-Captain face and went off to shower. And no, he did not linger on the fact that he himself had given off a face-off to sheer indignation that very same game, thank you very much.
It all came to a head – ha! – when Ilya decided that the middle of a blowjob was the perfect time to quote another gem out of the book Shane had already decided to burn the moment he got a chance.
He’d just pulled off another successful go-deep, wrist-twist, tongue-on-slit combo move and was enjoying the way Ilya’s thighs were trembling underneath him and how his moans had gone low and breathy, when the fingers in his hair tightened.
“Shane,” Ilya breathed, reverent, making a warm shiver run down Shane’s spine. “Do you know why a rink has round corners?”
No fucking way.
Immediately indignant, Shane pulled off him, letting Ilya’s cock plop down against his belly, where it landed with a wet smack. “No, Ilya,” he protested. “Not during… Just. No. Please.”
Ilya looked at him, eyes wide and blue and innocent. His fingers were still in Shane’s hair, his cock was still hard and leaking, and yet he managed to sound so tender as he murmured: “Is because if they were 90 degrees, the ice would melt.”
And look, in an ideal world, that would have been the end of it. In fact, if Shane were someone with even a smidge of self-respect, he’d have gotten up and left – at least the room, but preferably the country.
Instead, he just stared at his boyfriend’s angelic smile, dismayed at his own inability to not be charmed by this utter troll of a man, and allowed himself to be pulled up into a kiss.
It hadn’t exactly been his plan for Rose to meet Ilya via FaceTime.
In fact, Shane had spent considerable time coming up with natural and totally pressure-free ways to bring the two of them together and have it go seamlessly well. One of those involved an elaborate maladaptive daydream about him and Ilya having cameos in her newest movie and Ilya heroically saving her from a falling set piece - or maybe a mean PA? – and Rose then looking at Shane like ‘wow, where did you find this gorgeous, brave man’ and Shane being all proud and smug (but modestly so) and then Rose and Ilya becoming close but in a Shane-is-their-favorite-still kind of way.
To say that none of that came to pass was a bit of an understatement. Because instead, Ilya, who was a troublemaker at the best of times, decided that walking into camera range butt-naked was the way to, figuratively, break the ice. “Oh, sorry,” he said, looking anything but, accent purposefully turned up. “I did not know you were talking to your ex, Shane, or I would not have walked in like this.”
Shane sputtered. “She’s not – Jesus Christ, Ilya!” He turned back to Rose and could practically see her struggling to pick between all the things she wanted to say. None of which, he suspected, set to improve the situation.
Ilya stood, cock out, face set and Rose had opened and closed her mouth so often she looked like a fish stuck on dry land. There was an awkward pause Shane’s brain decided to fill with anxiousness, which was a fun thing it did when left to its own devices. He was so busy with picturing a desolate future in which two of the most important people in his life hated each other, breath hitching with anticipatory heartbreak, that he almost missed the way Ilya’s face suddenly softened.
Crouching down behind Shane, he leaned over the back of the couch and brushed a gentle kiss to his temple. “So, Rose,” he said then, conversationally. “Do you know what an enforcer does in hockey?”
Her eyes narrowed. “I do, actually,” she answered, tone icy.
“Ah,” Ilya said, unphased. “Just checking.”
It took a second for the joke to settle, but when it did, Rose’s eyes widened and she beamed with delight. “I like you,” she declared. “An asshole with puns and beautiful curls? Well done, Shane.”
And Ilya, never one not to be charmed by a compliment, deranged though as it may be, preened. “I am also quite good at sex,” he added.
“Oh,” Rose said, her smile turning into a smirk. “I know.”
Which made both of them laugh and mime high fives at their respective cameras, and just like that, a friendship was forged. No movie set, no heroic saves and sadly, no assurance for Shane that he was still their favorite.
He really should have been more careful in what to wish for.
“Look, dad,” Shane said, gesturing toward the deck where Ilya was busy teaching his mom Russian swear words. “I’m not saying it’s your fault that Ilya’s a…” He hesitated. His instinct was to say either ‘dick’ or ‘asshole’, but while both were definitely true, they were not words he wanted his dad to associate with his future son-in-law.
Well. Any more than he already did at least.
“A menace?” His dad suggested, and while that was a bit too mild a descriptor in Shane’s opinion, he nodded.
“I mean,” he continued, taking a sip of ginger ale before gesturing with the can towards where Ilya was now – showing his mom how to do a backflip? “Obviously he was like this before he got the book. But you have to admit that it’s gotten worse since then.”
“Oh.” His dad looked chagrined, but also a little bit like a cat that had gotten a particularly well-fed canary. “Say, son, I know you told me before, but when’s Ilya’s birthday again?”
And Shane? Shane finally understood why it was called a punchline.
(Because he felt like he had just gotten punched in the face, but in a good way. Kind of. He was still deciding.)