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There were a million reasons why it made no sense for Ilya to teach Shane Russian.
Most importantly: One, they had better things to do (each other) in the week left in the cottage and then in the short pockets of time they could steal to be together during the season. Two, Ilya wasn’t a fucking language teacher. He had no fucking clue how to start teaching someone a new alphabet except point at letters and sound them out. Even then, he’d probably manage to forget one.
They’d been at the cottage for a week, having lazy breakfast out on the sunny back patio, when Shane started asking how to read Cyrillic. By the time they were making lunch, Ilya finally looked past how touching he found his sincerity and made an attempt to derail the conversation. He grabbed a loose envelope from the kitchen counter and wrote two words on it in handwriting that would have gotten him a failing grade in school.
Shane looked excited for a moment, grabbing the envelope to stare at the words. Then he side-eyed Ilya for a moment. “What does it say?”, he asked, like he suspected he must have written either something very stupid or very perverted, which was honestly fair.
Ilya hummed. “Important vocabulary. Everyone should know,” he said, flicking the paper in Shane’s hand. “'Ilya Rozanov.' Boston's star center? You might have heard of him.”
“Oh.” Shane didn’t roll his eyes like Ilya had expected and just stared at the writing for a while. “Wow. Now I feel bad. I wouldn’t even recognize your name.”
Ilya shrugged, genuinely unbothered. “Is different alphabet. Can I read ‘Shane Hollander’ in Japanese? No.”
“I can show you,” said Shane, which completely missed Ilya’s point, but okay. He grabbed the pen and wrote a few careful letters (probably syllables?) in Japanese under Ilya’s, the first word longer than the second. All in all, his name looked shorter than Ilya’s above it although they were almost the same length in English.
Ilya’s handwriting looked even worse now. He liked the look of them next to each other anyway.
Ilya traced along Shane’s name with a finger. “You know some? Japanese?”
It felt weird to ask – or not to know. He’d never heard him speak the language, not even for interviews or the kind of stupid social media content where Ilya and a couple of other players in his team were sometimes asked to say whatever the fuck in their first or second languages.
Shane shook his head. “I used to understand a lot, as a child, but I never really learnt to write and then just kind of forgot. Honestly, I just know my name because some kids in school used to ask about it.”
Ilya hummed. “Why learn Russian, then? Learn Japanese first, is probably still in your brain somewhere. Your mom knows it, yes? You can ask her.”
He could immediately tell by Shane’s non-reaction that it had been a stupid thing to say. It was more complicated, he guessed, to learn a language you had known once, than to learn a completely new one.
“At some point, maybe,” Shane finally said. “Right now, I've recently acquired a Russian boyfriend, so I’m going to learn Russian. Which is why I’m asking you.”
It still took them until dinner (and a lot of on-and-off arguing) until Shane acquiesced that it probably made more sense to just buy a language book or try a couple of apps. In return, Ilya promised to help where he could, although he wasn’t sure he could explain the linguistics of his own language. Shane looked perfectly content researching websites and apps and muttering about conversation practice, though, so Ilya would figure it out.
“It will be very strange,” Ilya said. “Treating you like a friend in front of people.”
Shane was lying on the couch with some boring hockey book, looking up through his glasses at Ilya, who had just walked in to share his shower thoughts from five minutes ago. “Since you’re so used to aggravating me in public? Being a dick?”
Ilya wondered if Shane had added a translation for “aggravating” in case he didn’t know the term. Although it was kind of thoughtful, Ilya really wanted to complain about it. The only thing stopping him was that he wasn’t sure he could explain “aggravating” well enough if Shane called him out on it.
“No,” Ilya said instead. He plopped down on the other side of the giant coach and held Shane’s ankle with one hand. “I mean yes. But also, we’re not… you are not my friend. Do I need to call you ‘bro’? Or ‘dude’? Would be strange. Unsexy.”
He didn’t mention that he never called anyone “bro” or “dude”. He was pretty sure he’d tried it out a few times, when he’d first come to Boston, but it sounded embarrassing coming from his mouth. Like he was trying too hard to be American.
“It’s not like we were romantic with each other the first couple of years. You didn’t call me ‘bro’ then either, right?”
“Yes, because I was trying to fuck you,” Ilya said. “Not be your bro.”
Shane laid his open book down on his stomach. “As far as I know, you do fuck your friends, sometimes.”
“Is different,” Ilya said. It was. “Also, not anymore.” Even in his deepest denial phases, fucking Shane had always been different than fucking, like, Svetlana. Not only because he could actually hang out with Svetlana without freaking out. Or freaking out the entire league.
Shane sat up a little straighter. His eyes wandered over Ilya’s body. There was something in his expression that made Ilya expect he was up to some fucking bullshit.
“Is it really that different, dude?”, Shane asked with a straight face and a shrug.
Ilya physically recoiled, his hand flinching away from where it had been wandering up Shane’s leg. “Fucking hell,” he said. “Do not do that.”
“What do you mean?”, Shane asked innocently. “We’re such good friends, great buddies. It’s normal to say ‘dude,’ bro.”
Ilya stood up and backed away across the room. “Stop. This is first time in my life, my whole life, I am not attracted to you. I will leave. Steal the stupid English car and drive to Boston.”
Shane was already giving himself away by laughing, but he held on to his stupid fucking joke. “Why? We’re having such a good time on our boys’ trip, just two guys being besties and-“
Shane’s loud laughter followed Ilya through the back door outside, where he just kind of walked down the yard up to the edge of the water. He put his hands into his sides and looked into the distance over the glistening lake, trying to erase the last two minutes of his life from memory.
Shane followed him only a few moments later, once he had managed to stop laughing, probably. He snaked his arms around Ilya’s waist and hooked his chin over his shoulder.
“Sorry,” he said, still with a smile in his voice. “It’s funny because it’s so absurd.”
Ilya made a sound that he hoped conveyed that he didn’t think it was very funny, but he also wanted Shane to keep hugging him.
“We’ll survive, though, right?”, Shane continued. “Pretending to be friends. It’s not like people will expect us to be super close right away, it’s fine if we behave just kind of like usual, right? Without the flirting, I mean. Also, imagine talking after a game or going out to eat without having to come up with a reasonable explanation every time.”
As always with this man, Ilya folded immediately, turning his head to press a kiss to Shane’s temple. “Okay, true, will be nice,” he said. “But do not do that if you ever want to fuck again. Is not a threat, I mean I could not. Physically.”
He was obviously lying. Shane pressed his laugh into the fabric of one of his own shirts covering Ilya’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. I made myself the least horny I’ve been all vacation by doing that. Maybe the joke wasn’t even worth it.”
Ilya nodded decidedly and wrapped his arms around Shane’s. If it hadn’t been for the sound of Shane’s loud, uninhibited laughter, it really wouldn’t have been.
“First injury?”
“Uh.” Shane passed the puck back, trying to decide what counted as “injury”. He’d been getting kind of banged up on the ice on a weekly basis almost as long as he could remember. “My friend kicked me in the shin once when I was, like, five? Off the ice, but with skates on. Does that count?”
Ilya laughed, head thrown back to the ceiling.
They were on Shane’s practice rink in the basement of the cottage, not doing any productive training or workout, just messing around. “Poor baby Shane,” Ilya said. “Getting a cut on small leg. Why did the child hate you so much?”
“It left a scar! It was kind of deep!”, Shane protested. He wondered whether to change topics to one of his stories about the concerning number of light concussions he’d suffered throughout his teens. “I don’t even remember why he did it. I barely remember who it was.”
Ilya was smiling way too happily for this conversation. Shane’s heart didn’t seem to get the memo that he was trying to be annoyed because his boyfriend was being annoying. It just kept thumping hard in his chest, blissfully happy to see Ilya like this, unguarded and relaxed.
“I know the scar,” Ilya said. “Very impressive, so it counts. Your turn.”
Shane didn’t throw the injury question back at him because he genuinely didn’t want to hear about a young Ilya getting hurt on the ice. Shane could get pretty upset thinking about Ilya as a child and how lonely he sounded in the few, small stories he’d heard about him.
“Were you a good student? Back in school?”, Shane asked instead.
Ilya laughed again, managing to pass the puck back basically with his eyes closed. Shane automatically tried to copy him. He didn’t take his eyes off of Ilya’s and passed the puck smoothly and easily two times, three. Nice.
Ilya caught on to what he was doing and stopped looking down at the synthetic "ice" of the rink as well, his passes getting just a little meaner. “What do you think?”, he asked.
Shane shrugged, keeping up, skating a little further away to make their passes longer. “I don’t know. I went to school with enough hockey guys who were kind of shit at everything, but I don’t think they were that stupid, just didn’t care. Also, I don’t know how hard school is in Moscow.”
“I don’t know how hard school is in Ottawa,” Ilya countered. “I was okay. Did not try very hard at the end because there was no need for good grades for university.” He grinned crookedly. “But I am charming and know how to read, right? Was okay.”
Shane nodded and made them slow down for a few long passes, using more of the space. Knowing Ilya, his grades were probably pretty decent if that’s how he phrased it. If he had been a bad student, he probably would have just admitted it with a joke and then immediately bragged about something else to change the topic. “Did you learn English in school?”
Ilya shrugged again. “Yes, but my teacher was shit. And I did not like it. Languages are hard and English is too… different from Russian, to learn easily. Grammar makes no sense, so many great words are missing. You spell things how you want, makes no sense, pronunciation is just whatever. Is hard to say word right even when you can spell it. Also, stupid articles, who needs them?” He groaned exaggeratedly and hit the puck hard, but easy for Shane to receive. “I liked it a bit better when I was older, maybe. When I knew I will be drafted by NHL.”
Ilya looked up from the ice suddenly, hogging the puck for a moment as a scandalised expression broke out on his face, finger pointing at Shane. “You tricked me! I also get two questions now.”
They had never agreed on any rules in the first place and Shane couldn’t quite remember how this game of questions had started. He smiled innocently at his boyfriend, anyway. “Sounds like you should have paid more attention. I'll be nice: you get one question and if it’s a good one, you get a second.”
“Of course you will like my question,” Ilya scoffed. “First love? No, I mean- first crush?”
“Oh my God,” Shane said, rolling his eyes.
“Was it me?”, Ilya followed up immediately, skating stupid wriggly waves back and forth that fit his playful smile. “You can say me, I understand.”
“We met when we were seventeen, of course it wasn’t you,” Shane said.
Ilya’s grin grew wider before Shane had understood what he’d said. “You had crush on me after one meeting, Hollander? So cute.”
Shane could feel the heat on his face and ignored it. “Shut up. That’s not the question. I had a girlfriend when I was fourteen, maybe?”
“A girlfriend,” Ilya echoed, eyebrows at his hairline. A hundred questions threatened to burst out behind those two words.
“God, I don’t even remember, but I liked, her, right? Kind of. We went to the cinema, like twice, and kissed a bit and then she broke up with me, which hurt my ego. But I honestly didn’t know what else to do with her, so I was relieved, too.”
“To the cinema,” Ilya repeated. “Wow. Like in movies. But that is no crush, if you just liked her. When you were small, no childhood crushes? No… teachers, kids in school, people in movies? Oh! Hockey players?”
Shane focused on the puck for a while. He’d never really thought about it. He’d navigated through his life until kind of recently under the impression that he was hopefully mostly kind of straight. He hadn’t really examined his early life under that kind of light yet.
He’d had a lot of hockey players on his walls, of course. Players from Montreal because of his mom and Ottawa because, well, obviously. He didn’t think he'd liked them that much, though. Or in that way. Although Shane wasn’t sure how to differentiate between deep admiration and a small crush when he hadn’t even known these people in real life.
“I don’t… know,” Shane said. “I never really thought about people like that. Or men, I guess. When I was that small. I didn’t really… Oh my God.” Shane almost let the puck slide through his legs, fumbling to catch it in the last moment. “Oh my God,” he repeated. “I had a huge crush on my friend’s older brother. I think.”
Ilya laughed so hard he had to lean on his stick for support. The puck shot off past him to wherever the fuck, clattering into the boards somewhere. “You just remembered now?”
Shane was too stunned to feel embarrassed. “Yeah, I just realized,” he said. “I saw him all the time at the rink, because he - shut up, yes, he played hockey - because he trained some kids there. He wasn’t that good, definitely not NHL material, but a really solid skater. Powerful. I never realized that was a… a crush, but when I was maybe ten, I thought about his voice shouting across the ice and his fucking hair or whatever while I fell asleep every night for weeks.” Shane laughed. It was fucking incredible that he’d never remembered this before. “I thought I wanted to be like him. I was so crushed when my mom took me to train with a better team at a different rink, I cried, like, three times and didn’t even understand why.”
It was strange to realize this now, over a decade after it had happened, and kind of embarrassing. At the same time, though, it was fucking liberating. He’d been like this all his life. The version of himself Shane knew now wasn’t new at all, he was just starting to make sense of it.
Ilya had put his stick down on the plastic floor while Shane had been talking, coming closer until he hovered right in front of him. Shane was ready to be made fun of. Good-naturedly of course. He wasn’t ready for Ilya to cradle Shane’s head in both of his big hands while staring into his eyes. Ilya squeezed his cheeks a little, bared his teeth wide enough that his nose crinkled and made a growling sound like he was angry.
“That is so fucking cute,” he said, words pressed through his teeth, shaking Shane’s face side to side gently. “Of course you would like big, nice hockey player. Friend’s brother, because you like danger. Poor baby Shane, not understanding his first crush and being so, so sad.”
Shane pried Ilya’s hands from his face and pushed him away, although he skated right after him as Ilya let himself glide backwards, grinning.
“Please don’t crush my head,” he said. “You get a second question. If you still want it.”
Ilya grinned like he’d just won a million dollars and didn’t hesitate for a second. “First sex toy, size, color, where is it now?”
“Okay, I think we’re done here,” said Shane, skating off amidst loud protest to collect the puck they’d lost.
“Would you like being straight?”, Ilya mumbled, one night, into the crown of Shane’s hair.
Shane was too happy and sleepy and warm tangled up with his boyfriend to spare a thought to being heterosexual. “Kinda hard to picture that right now,” he mumbled back, his face half-squished against Ilya’s chest.
Ilya was silent. The patterns he was tracing up and down Shane’s back with light fingertips paused for a second, which probably meant something about Shane’s answer had been wrong. He tried to think of something better to say but couldn’t really figure out what went wrong the first time.
Ilya spoke again before Shane could redo his answer. “Took you long time to find out,” he said. “Did it feel… bad to understand it? Disappointing?”
Shane still remembered it; the gentle conversation with Rose, the first time he’d admitted to anyone, even himself, even tentatively, that he was gay. Then, telling Ilya about it because it felt important to say the words to him, for him to know for sure. Ilya had laughed at him back then and if Shane really tried, he could see the humor in the situation now. If he really tried.
“It wasn’t,” Shane said. “It wasn’t disappointing. I didn’t find out as much as I just… admitted it to myself, maybe. It was a relief. Terrifying, though.”
“Terrifying,” Ilya said. He sounded thoughtful. Shane wondered what had triggered this unguarded version of him that started conversations about feelings while falling asleep after sex. Shane kind of wanted to keep this version of Ilya around very badly. Not all day, maybe, but for moments like these.
“Yes. I just… I don’t know. I spent a million years thinking I was straight and hadn’t found the right person. And then… What?”
“Sorry,” said Ilya. Shane could still feel the tremors of Ilya’s laugh through his warm chest although he could tell he was trying to swallow it back down. “Is serious, but. While we were fucking? You thought you were straight while we were fucking? That you will go find a woman?”
“Shut up,” Shane said. “Obviously I knew I wasn’t, like, fully straight, but I just didn’t think about it. You didn’t do that?”
“No,” said Ilya. “I thought everyone is bisexual but they pretended to be normal. Too late to freak out when I found out.”
I don’t think you’re supposed to call being heterosexual normal, Shane considered saying, although maybe it was too late at night for semantics. He opened his mouth and listened to himself say, “God, for a while I thought I just had to find a woman willing to peg me and I’d be fine.”
He regretted his words even while saying them. He drew back and watched with trepidation as Ilya’s sleepy eyes went huge. He flipped his entire body around away from Shane with a whomp, buried his face into the pillow, where he tried and failed to stifle his screaming laughter.
Shane sighed and turned on the lamp next to his bed. “Fuck all the way off,” he said, lying flat on his back. His face felt burning hot but he coudln't help but smile up at the ceiling as he listened to Ilya’s muffled giggling.
It took Ilya a moment before he could resurface from the pillow, face pink and shiny and obviously trying hard not to start laughing again. “How did that go for you?”, he asked.
“What I was trying to say,” Shane barrelled past this part of the conversation, “I did sexuality maths in my own head for a million years. It was nice to just allow myself to call it as it is.”
Ilya nodded. The color in his face was slowly returning to normal, and he didn’t have to bite his lips closed anymore to keep the smile in. “Okay,” he said. “Makes sense. Is simple now.”
“Yes,” Shane said. “Simple.”
Neither of them acknowledged that simple didn’t mean easy, or uncomplicated. They knew that.
Twenty minutes later, the light was still on as they both drifted pleasantly between awake and sleeping. Shane thought sluggishly about how much he liked the weight and heat of Ilya’s arm that he’d thrown over Shane’s waist. He thought about what he'd said just now, what Ilya had asked into the darkness, if Shane would enjoy being straight.
Suddenly, a cold shiver ran up his back. Had Ilya meant “Would you like being straight” or had he meant “Would you rather be straight”?
Shane shot up. “I would still be with you if I liked women,” he said, looking at Ilya just to realize that he’d actually been fast asleep. The sudden movement made him jerk awake and start swearing instinctively, looking around in confusion. Maybe Shane’s voice had been a bit loud.
“Fucking- they will find me dead in your house, Hollander, heart attack, and you will have to explain to press what happened,” he said, lying back down with a hand over his eyes. He took a deep breath. “What is it now?”
“Sorry,” Shane said, feeling genuinely bad but also suddenly very embarrassed about the reason he’d woken Ilya up. He laid back down and reached for the light. “Nevermind. Goodnight.”
“What the fuck, no,“ Ilya said, sitting up and pulling Shane’s arm back gently. “Now I am awake. What did you say? Women?”
Because Shane wasn’t a chicken, he repeated with his whole chest while looking at the spot right between Ilya’s eyes, “I said I would still be with you if I liked women. I just wanted to tell you that.”
“Oh,” said Ilya. Then he frowned. “No you would not. I’m a man.”
“If I liked women too,” Shane clarified. He couldn’t tell, sometimes, whether Ilya was joking. “If I was bisexual.”
Ilya raised his eyebrows. “You would be with Rose Landry if you were bisexual.”
Shane rolled his eyes but then thought about it seriously for a moment. “God, I hope not,” he concluded quickly. This conversation was getting really confusing. “I really didn’t enjoy the sex with her.”
“Shane, that is because you are gay,” Ilya said, a bit wildly. Shane couldn’t tell if he was close to tears or angry or what. “If you were bisexual, you would like fucking her.”
“I guess.” Shane tried to imagine it and couldn’t. His thoughts took a detour to the envelope with both of their names - Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander - written close together that he’d glimpsed tucked safely into Ilya’s luggage. “I don’t really like thinking about that. I like being with you too much.“
He felt a bit bad talking about Rose like this; he loved her so much, she was his best friend. She would probably agree, though. Thinking about them together romantically was getting more and more awkward with time.
Ilya was staring at him, eyes wide. “Ugh,” he finally said and wrapped his arms around Shane. He maneuvered them onto their sides and shaped himself along Shane’s back, using all of his hard-earned hockey muscles to squeeze hard. The feeling sent a happy shudder through Shane’s entire body. “Stop waking me up to say sweet things," Ilya said. "Just tell them tomorrow.”
“Not sure I have anything left in me for tomorrow,” Shane said. “Maybe it’s your turn.”
Ilya pressed a kiss into the nape of his neck. “I love you,” he mumbled. “Sleep now.”
Shane smiled and pressed himself even closer. “Good start.”