Chapter Text
It's Rozanov's fault. Just for the record.
Shane had systems. Plans, even. Ways of operating. They had worked for the first 23 years of his life.
Maybe not for the whole 23. The last five had been — well. A little dicey, maybe.
And the first years of his life, for the record, he had not even needed a system. They had been easy, the way being a kid was easy, because you hadn't really figured out yet that everyone else was a person in the way you were a person, with a whole little world inside them, but actually everyone else seemed to agree what that whole little world should look like and yours was different.
He'd been about nine when a whole bunch of things came to a head. That was the year when:
1. David McIntyre, sociopath of the swingset, had asked Shane why his mom looked weird, and Shane had learned that he and his mom were different not in the way that blondes are different from brunettes but in a way that mattered more.
2. Shane had started to suspect there was a language everyone else spoke, something in the face and the tone of voice and the tilt of a head, and people got mad when he didn't speak it but no one tried to teach it to him either.
3. He had his first sleepover, and he and Robby Gagnon watched a movie with a kissing scene (they'd been vocal in their disgust, but hadn't fast–forwarded) and fell asleep in sleeping bags on the living room floor, and Shane had dreamt of kissing Robby, and woken with the knowledge that he never would.
4. It turned out that Shane was really really really good at hockey.
So that was when the systems came into being. They were never a fully articulated ethos so much as a general plan of attack: mimic, assimilate, grind. In hockey you got better by waking up before the sun and hitting a puck a hundred times until you no longer remembered how to not score. It made sense that the same would work for everything else. He learned to make conversation to the bridge of someone's nose. He learned to not mind comments about the shape of his eyes.
It was, admittedly, a little harder to apply sheer determination to sexuality, but he had never believed in letting that stop him. He learned to make vague comments about girls. He asked Mackenzie Ellis to the winter dance. He kept two tabs of porn open, one straight and one not, and once his orgasm was rushing inevitably through him would switch to the straight one, so that it counted. He didn’t need to be 100% straight, he just needed to not be 100% gay.
There were times, as his internet history accrued, that the systems started to feel less like a winning formula and more like plausible deniability. But he did not underrate plausible deniability. It was what allowed for hope.
Hope for him took the shape of a girl in the future. He thought of her often. Her face was a little blurry in his mind. Her body was also pretty blurry. She was more an outline of an outline, but she had a nice smile, and curly hair — he liked curly hair. It would probably be blonde; most of the guys in the league seemed to date blondes. The important thing was she would be nice, and know a lot about hockey. They would have sex, and it would be fine. They would get married, and his mom and dad would cry at the ceremony. Then they would have kids, probably. He didn’t know a lot about kids but he knew he liked the way babies smelled.
The girl hadn’t shown up yet, but she didn’t have to. She would, eventually, and that was all he needed from her, to exist in the potential, because the actual kept getting dicier. But thoughts and pornography were just thoughts and pornography, and he knew enough about adolescent boys as a general category to know nobody wanted to be judged by what they jerked off to at seventeen. The future girl remained; the system remained.
The system remained through Ilya Rozanov jacking his giant dick in the showers. It remained through Shane putting said dick in his mouth with embarrassing speed after their first kiss. It remained through Shane discovering what the dick felt like in his ass, and learning in subsequent encounters how hard it could fuck him into the mattress or a hotel room carpet.
This probably should have concerned him more. But it had seemed instead an impressive display of the system's adaptability. Flexibility was a good thing, he'd been told. He had never really gotten the hang of the non-physical kind, and wasn't he constantly being encouraged to? Everyone had opinions on the rigidity of his diet and his need to remove various sticks from various parts of his body.
The future girl was flexible. She would be understanding. He would tell her — not everything, but something somewhat true. He would say that he didn't have a lot of experience with this, and she would say that's fine, she did, and could take the lead. That wouldn't be so bad.
Although —
Actually —
It did concern him the extent to which he envisioned the future girl taking the lead. He knew that with a girl he was supposed to be — not "in charge,” he wasn't a Neanderthal; he knew what feminism was — but more of an… active participant, maybe. More of a team leader.
He was not a leader with Rozanov. Never had been. Never had needed to be, because unlike certain Russian idiots he didn't go around cruising fellow players in the shower and bullying them with dick pics. Clearly Rozanov liked to be in charge, and that worked, because Shane liked to be the thing he was in charge of. He had always worked best with a coach.
There did come a point at which he wondered if he should worry less about liking Rozanov’s dick in his ass and worry more about his own dick having never been in anything but Rozanov’s mouth. But once more, the system proved flexible. A negative could be a positive. Plausible deniability sprung eternal. If he had never had sex with a girl, if he had never been the, uh, active party during sex, that only meant that he had not yet proven that he couldn't. When the future girl did show up, he would try it and find that it was totally fine. He would probably regret not trying it sooner.
This was all solid reasoning. He drifted off to sleep many nights with the memory of Rosanov's come on his tongue and the comforting reassurance that the future girl remained undisproven. The only worry that slipped in was at the thought that his blissful life with future girl would come at the expense of the sex he was currently having. It was becoming increasingly hard to imagine giving it up. He did not want to be one of those men who slipped out on their wives for something sordid. It seemed bad enough the number of men in the league who hid girls in different cities from their families; he felt sick at the thought of the tabloid headlines about Shane Hollander caught in a sleazy hotel with a dominatrix and rent boys.
Shane didn't even like dominatrixes. Too much leather. And what could a rent boy do for him? They wouldn't be —
They wouldn't be him.
That was the saddest part, really. No matter what happened, no matter what kind of sex he had in the future, it wouldn't be with Rozanov. Future sex would not involve Rozanov’s mouth, or his hands, or cock, or the deep purr of his voice, or the eyes that could shift from steel to soft in a second. Mostly it felt lonely, the idea of Shane with his future girl and Rozanov with his own future girl.
(She would be a supermodel, Russian, definitely blonde, a Victoria's Secret angel and on the Sports Illustrated cover in a bikini. She would have soft skin and big breasts and Rozanov's accent but in a breathy, feminine voice. Rozanov would see her across the room at a party and fall hard and instantaneously. She would make him chase her for a long time, maybe even years. She wouldn't kneel on a hotel carpet three seconds after their first kiss. Rozanov would go big: roomfuls of red roses, diamond necklaces, public declarations that she alone had his heart. Shane was quite sure Rozanov had never romanced anyone before. He was equally sure that when Rozanov fell in love, he would throw himself into it with the same determination that made him the second best player in the league. It would work, and Rozanov would marry her in a lavish ceremony in Moscow, Saint Tropez honeymoon to follow. They would spend the rest of their lives having beautiful Slavic children and attending fashionable parties, all of which would be documented by gossip bloggers and delivered directly to Shane's phone.)
It worried him, and it worried him how much it worried him. This addiction to sex with Rozanov felt pathological. Sex was supposed to be something you could talk about in the locker room, not a secret waiting to destroy your whole life.
He wasn't sure how to make the system work for this. His first attempt was to just stop having sex with Rozanov. He blocked his number, which worked for all of four days, after which he unblocked it, saw that he had a text saying send hole pic plz manitoba is boringggg, obliged, and then fucked him six days later in a hotel room. His second attempt was to work so hard he wouldn’t have time to think about sex. He showed up for practice forty-five minutes early, left late, added more cross training, and cut out sugar and histamines from his diet. Mostly it made him tired, and when he slept he dreamt of Rozanov. It lasted two weeks, after which he fucked him in Boston.
His third attempt — the one that worked, like a charm — was inspired by the memory of Douglas Prescott. Coach Doug had been a bear of a man, more pelt than skin, and ran his team of nine-year-olds with a ferocity that would have made the navy weep. “Son,” he would say, “never underestimate the effectiveness of good old fashioned discipline.” When Shane’s mom had found out about the withholding water and the hitting with hockey sticks she had taken him out of the team, which Shane had never really understood. They were undefeated.
So. That’s how the whole “mistakes” thing started.
Shane was not, let it be noted, so stupid that he missed the irony of asking Rozanov to punish him for having sex with Rozanov. And to punish him in some decidedly sexual ways, although that part was all Rozanov’s idea. Shane never specified. But the best cure for a hangover was some hair of the dog, right? Shane had definitely been told that at some point.
So it followed that the system, in its third iteration, worked. It didn’t make him stop having sex with Rozanov, obviously. But it did make the worry go away. For a little bit, at least. When Rozanov punished him the worry that hummed in the back of Shane’s mind went silent. His brain went blissfully, beautifully blank. He would cry, he would whine, he would moan and push his ass back towards Rozanov’s spanking hand, pant open-mouthed as the golden arc of Rozanov’s piss hit his chest and chin, but his mind would fuzz out. He was not Shane Hollander, Canada’s next great hope, taking it up the ass from his arch rival. He was barely even Shane. He was just a thing, Rozanov’s thing, and things did not think.
When Rozanov told him not to come for a month the feeling did not last the whole time, which was a little disappointing but probably prevented him from distractedly driving his car into a bus or tanking the Metros’ chance at the playoffs, but it never fully went away either, popping in and out like a song stuck in his mind. Anytime he got hard, or even just felt his dick shift against his pants, it would settle over his thoughts like a weighted blanket. At night he would clutch the sheets, trying to rut against the friction of the cotton, and send pics of his weeping cock to Rozanov, who taunted him with videos of himself jacking off and texts: sorry little slut cannot come, too bad so sad.
All of which is to say: the system worked.
It worked until Rozanov decided to ruin it.
He’s not complaining about the collar part. Really, no complaints there. But after a week of fever dreams buzzing through his skull — Rozanov calling him a good boy, Rozanov putting a plate of food on the floor, Rozanov making him sleep at the foot of his bed — he showed up at Rozanov’s place and was greeted with decidedly not that.
“Today, you top,” Rozanov said, and Shane felt his brain dropkick itself out of a 30,000 foot plane and hurtle towards the sea.
He should have said no. He thinks he did say no, kind of, but also maybe yes. He doesn’t really remember. What he does remember is the moment his dick went in Rozanov’s ass and everything came crashing down. There was no escaping anything anymore, because it felt wrong. It felt good — tighter than Rozanov's mouth, and the leash yanking him into place — and it was all wrong. He couldn't do it. He had a collar around his neck and a deep voice in his ear giving commands and even then he couldn't do it.
The system could not hold.
Hope fled.
Plausible deniability abandoned him.
Rest in Peace, future girl.
When he finally comes it is not the orgasm so much as following Rozanov's instructions to orgasm that calms him fractionally. He feels dazed, disoriented. It's the feeling after a bad game, when you're upset but too fatigued to freak out. He doesn't know what he's supposed to do. But Rozanov seems to, cleaning them up and acting like nothing unusual has just happened. Shane makes himself get up and start dressing.
"Was good, yes? We do again?"
Shane doesn't really hear it, or whatever he says in response. It's only when he's gotten in the Uber and stopped at a traffic light that the words hit him.
Again?
He pitches forward in the backseat, burying his head in his knees.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Fuck.
"Hey man, you all right?"
Shane looks up. Right. Cabs have drivers. This one is looking at him warily in the rearview mirror from beneath a Patriots cap. Hopefully he's not a hockey fan.
“Yeah," Shane says, because he can't say I'm a faggot and I'm gonna die alone.
"If you throw up in my car I'll charge,” the man says sternly. He's got two days' scruff and a Boston accent so thick it takes Shane a second to understand what a “cah” is.
"I'm not gonna throw up,” he says, because he can't say I'm such a faggot I can't even properly fuck a man.
The driver seems to buy this, though not that Shane is a normal man having a normal day. "Well, listen,” he says with the wisdom of a man with a philosophy, "we all got stuff."
“Yeah," Shane agrees.
By the time the car pulls in front of the hotel, Shane has a new vision in his head. Future girl, resurrected, looks a bit different. Less happy. The wedding day seems tinged with gray. Future Shane has bile on the back of his tongue and has been practicing smiling in the mirror. But even with all that it still feels preferable to this.
"You feel like getting out?” The man is looking at him in the rear view again, eyebrows raised expectantly.
"Yeah, sorry. Thanks.” But before opening the door Shane pulls out his phone and pulls up the contact for “Lily.” Delete number; block caller; delete message history. He feels a plummeting in his stomach when it's done. He doesn't have any way of getting the number back now that it's gone. But as he leaves the car and walks through the hotel door he sets his jaw.
Mimic, assimilate, grind.
The system always works.