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“Shane,” Ilya says. At 6am. Like the menace he is. “Shane, your father is having stroke.”
“What? Ilya, are you serious?”
“Is very serious. He is sending me nonsense.”
“What? What do you—”
“Look at this. '7 down' he says. What is this 7 down? He is maybe dying.”
“Oh my god, Ilya, don't freak me out like that. He's sending you crossword clues.”
“His last message to his favourite son is of newspaper?”
“It's not his last message, you idiot.”
“He is about to die but he must tell me one last time that he is boring.”
“Ilya.”
“He is gifting his boring to me. To pass to our children. So the boring legacy may continue.”
“I'm going back to sleep.”
“Would you like me to go 7 down on you first?”
“... Yes.”
—
7 down. A bit of basil, yarn, and hockey player (4)
Ilya has to look up the answer. When he finds out that it’s his own name he has to look up how.
“Shane,” he says, aghast. “Shane, they are making up new rules for your awful language. I do not wish to know of this wordplay thing.”
Shane kisses the back of his head and then when Ilya isn’t looking he takes a photo of him hunched over the dining table squinting at the newspaper and chewing on a pencil. He sends the photo to his dad, who replies with a photo of his own beaming face, since he hasn’t figured out how to react to images with emojis yet.
—
10 across. Topless tail and bottomless yak makes a confused centaur (4)
Ilya is determined to solve this one himself. He already knows the answer will be his own name. How hard can it be to backsolve a stupid English sentence?
Shane rolls his eyes and brings him his coffee, and tugs the sports section out from underneath where Ilya is apparently going mad, muttering about centaurs not being made of yaks. Shane takes a photo of this, too, and sends it with the caption, You’ve broken my husband.
His dad replies, Definitely a confused centaur.
—
Shane always knows when one of them is featured in his dad’s crossword, because he wakes to Ilya swearing at his phone. Rozanov is used more often, apparently because of the weird arrangement of letters—perfect for tripping up the unsuspecting David Hollanders of the world.
He rolls over one morning to find Ilya wearing Shane’s glasses and scowling at his phone.
“Um,” he says, immediately awake. Ooh, hello. Is it his birthday?
Ilya turns the spectacled scowl on him. If it’s meant to be scary it is... remarkably ineffective.
“Shane. You are needing new glasses. These do not work.”
“Oh, I think they’re working just fine,” Shane says, crawling into his lap.
“No, they are not making the boring make sense. They are broken.” He goes to take them off but Shane presses them back into place, kissing over Ilya’s face as he does. He maybe understands now why Ilya is so fond of Shane wearing them. Ilya complains half-heartedly that he can’t see Shane properly with them on, but is quickly distracted as Shane’s kisses trail down to his jaw, then his neck, and then lower still.
His dad’s crossword update is a little late that morning.
—
On February 14th, Shane’s and Ilya’s names are featured not once, but twice. They share the A in their first names and the O in their last names, so that they intertwine across the whole puzzle. Ilya gets all misty eyed when he realises that the arrangement of the words makes the centre of the puzzle look like Ilya Hollander when read left to right.
Shane gets to come twice that night, and it probably would have been three times if he’d whispered Mr Hollander into Ilya’s ear any more.
Later, sweating gently and making vague plans about maybe, some day, getting up to shower, Ilya says, “Why did they not put my D in your name instead?”
“Your name isn’t spelled with a D, Ilya.”
Ilya gives a slow, victorious smirk, and Shane realises a second too late that he’s walked right into the joke. “I put D in you anyway, yes?”
Shane groans and whacks him with a pillow, and Ilya retaliates by manhandling him across the bed and biting over the backs of his shoulders, then down to his ass, cackling.
It turns out a third orgasm is on the cards for Shane after all.
—
On their anniversary, Shane prints out a still that was taken during the commercial they filmed all those years ago, as rookies. On the back, he writes:
Husband, first I’ll love you always (4)
It’s not as clever as the professional stuff that makes it to the newspaper's crosswords, but Ilya buys a frame and puts the photo on the mantle, and Shane’s pretty sure it’s his favourite clue of them all.