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They always beg for him sooner or later. Please, I can no longer live without you. I want you. I need you. Ilya, please. Come.
Only, they use the names he gives them, of course. Danny, can you come? Lily, when can I visit? When can we finally meet? I love you, I need you, Jake please—
Always, they ask. Always Ilya has the routing number ready. Most of the time they do not bother to verify the price he makes up for the imaginary ticket, too busy jerking off with one hand and zooming in on fake Lily’s fake tits with the other. With the gay ones, he likes thinking of how they must hurry to clean off the screen, after. Fat bone-white ribbons all over a photo of Ilya’s real abs.
If Sveta was still around, she would say this makes him vain.
And, so what? He has a lot to be vain about. His body, very much. Face, sort of. A job that pays pretty well, seeing as, in the ugly words of the American phrase book kept stuffed under his bed: a monkey could do it. Not his favorite. He enjoys: sweating like a whore in church. Hate your guts, eat your heart out. There is no book he could find for Canadian idioms, but Jane did not seem confused about head over heels. Maybe she had studied for her own story.
She’s a smart girl. For lying, first off, though she has less stamina for it than Ilya. He was sleeping when the confession cracked out of her. Gushing, dripping admission after dripping admission. She was sorry, she was scared, she didn’t mean to. She really, really likes—
Such a little thing, saying she was in Boston instead of Wherever, Canada. Ilya doesn’t care at all. He cares only to have this much more of her, how much there always seems to be. It makes his cock twitch: years and years of doing this, only six months of Jane and still she surprises him. She is so sweet, so, so shy, and suddenly the gloss slides off to show the fox beneath. Even if she acts sorry, small and scared. She’s got sturdier teeth than the rest; she is the only one of them that insists on buying the ticket herself instead of wiring him money.
They are more similar than not. Almost, she seems relieved when Ilya tells her that morning.
my baby, I lied a little bit, too. Moscow, not Boston. One little lie.
And, your name??
( yes. But now you know me. now its real.
It goes on for a week, back and forth, back and forth. She wants him and doesn’t, she likes him and doesn’t. Simple tease and still it makes the skin under Ilya’s shirt itch. When she finally buys it, she does not say so except with the screenshot, and the question:
How do I know you’re going to show up?
Ilya always thought of her voice as a lavender, skinny-legged soft stalks brushing each other in a breeze. Even the color too shy to saturate. Now, there is deepness to it. A sheen of sweet with something more sticky underneath. Ilya moves his tongue around in his mouth, an empty dry ditch without being able to taste her.
You won’t. This is what makes it exciting :)
--
Such a planner, this fox. She buys the ticket a month out, there and back for three days squeezed into the middle of June. Nothing like the others who need him now now now, creaming their jeans before the bank confirmation email.
Don’t you miss me too much? Don’t you need me right away?
Ilya is out, barely paying attention to what his thumbs are doing. Happy and drunk after a long day of neither.
The days have been tighter lately, the morning long and quiet except for the brittle clacking of his keyboard, a hard-shelled insect alone until Alexei wakes up and his bitching starts up through the plaster. If they are speaking to each other, Ilya will work from the couch. They put on a game, KHL or Supreme, MLH if Ilya is willing to get slugged in the face and called a stupid faggot. Mostly he is.
It is lonely being ten, twenty people, talking constantly. Ilya’s spine aches, grows permanently curved while he is a new transplant just getting into the dating game in New York, unlucky in love but hopeless romantic in Phoenix, horny and willing in Charlotte. Boston often and one in Kansas City. Some words you can’t say without clunking like an American pickup truck. Kan-sas ci-ty.
He tries it on the girl tucked into his arm, “I’m Danny from Kansas City.” She laughs at him, puts her hand over his big mouth to stop more from coming out. She lets him practice all night, English with his tongue, French with hers. A sloppy alphabet after that, languageless and licked between her legs.
Jane responds the next day, halfway through Ilya’s morning hangover.
I haven’t even met you yet.
Between his temples, it is all throb. Fine. Ilya will wait her out. They always beg for him eventually.
--
A week later, still nothing. Jane is particular. She does not respond well to grovel. Im so so so sorry, baby and the string of wet-eyed emoticons are enough for the rest of them. Jane says once she does not believe in sorry. I mean, what does that mean? You do something or you don’t. Then you move on.
She likes it if Ilya gives in, though. Just a different giving in. For her it is putting a slit in the stomach, rummaging around for some gushing pulse. Ilya will give her as much as he can without getting blood everywhere. She likes the inside of him, but she does not like mess.
Well I miss you
She will not peel her panties off herself but she will let Ilya do it. With his teeth, even. She lets him.
That’s stupid. You haven’t even met me :)
The smile is enough. One tight little crack that he can put his fingers in and work until she is wide, wide open. The opening of it drags him up from the couch and back into his cramp of a room, door shut, nose to the screen. Just that fucking line does it. The closest he can get; he has never seen her mouth or any other, more secret part of her. Most of them send pictures—used to send pictures. More and more he cannot find the energy to keep up with anyone else.
Ilya’s hand worms under his waistband. Always a risk to jerk off in the middle of the day when Alexei might come home and accuse him of holing up in his room to do just that, but he can be quick, with her. He can be whatever he wants.
Can you not feel me, though? i can feel you all the time
Feel what
all of you. but I will start slow, take you apart piece by piece.
It takes her a few minutes to respond. The timing is not incidental; the sparse middle of Ilya’s afternoon is her early morning. She’s softer in the morning. He pushes his face against the pillow, cheek far enough into the rough cotton to burn.
Yeah. Fuck, I want that.
start with your mouth. Taste there with my fingers, push in and make you taste.
god
Push flat your tongue, all your wet, your teeth.
yeah
You could bite down, make it hurt. would you? not unless i tell you to, i think. You are a good girl. you are so good.
I won’t. Ill be good
Jane your grammar ) are you busy? are you touching yourself right now?
yeah. Fuck I’m close.
good ) But not until I say. tell me how it feels
Hot.
hard to type
tell me
Hot, and so much Not enough. I wish you were inside of me
Ilya groans. His fist works in short hurried pulls, confined, too rushed to get his cock out. Such a liar; Ilya can’t go slow. She lets Ilya tell her everything. How deep inside her his fingers can feel once he traces along the puffy lips between her legs, the humid suck of her cunt, how the wet looks drooling down the inside of his wrist. Ilya will lick it and then lick her. His mouth is empty except for the taste of her: tender fold and stubborn velvet, slick hiding warm, the way skin is. He comes with his tongue thick in the crease of his own bent arm, trying to taste her in the inside of his elbow.
Ilya thinks she is probably ugly. That she doesn’t believe him, that he will want her no matter what. That he does.
He likes ugly people. He likes most people. She knows about the old teacher he slept with in school, about Alexei’s bulldog of a girlfriend, about Sasha and the rest of the exploratory cock. He tells her he would eat her cunt if it is fat or if her clit swells up like a little pink dick. If she has a man’s beard down there, so much hair he has to nose around just to find a way in, soaked tip searching silky matted curls. If she has one leg or two assholes, anything. Anything. He wants her very badly. It is a joke until it isn’t.
--
Sveta knows because Ilya makes the mistake of bragging. This is typical with her; he forgets she listens. A month ago it seemed easy, how far was this Ottawa from Boston? Didn’t she have all those cars, couldn’t she stow him in the trunk, take him, let him stay with her for a while? He could sleep at the foot of her bed like a dog and lick her feet to wake her in the morning.
Just fucking with her, but why shouldn’t he stay? He could make money from anywhere, with anyone. He is very, very good.
A week before, he calls Sveta. The speaker becomes a gash, the pulsing gut of a club, then the slam before the quiet. “I was just thinking. Don’t come.”
She laughs. “What?”
“No need.”
“Oh?” she cackles, the sound shattering in his ear. “Oh no. Crazy man.”
He lifts up a shoulder, drops it like she can see. “We are good. Good match. Perfect match. Maybe we will get married, and you will not be invited to my big beautiful wedding for being such a cunt about it.”
She laughs and laughs.
--
Jane still will not say she misses him and still Ilya texts her every day. She would put her ugly head in the oven before admitting it, but she loves the attention. Unfurls under his like a damp petal, leaves Ilya broad and hot and so much the sun he doesn’t think there is room in the world for a second.
A day before the flight he asks her what to pack, what is Ottawa like?
She texts back: Um. A whole text just for that. Ilya has had a very long, very stupid day. He brings the glass to his mouth and kisses it.
It’s nice. I can’t believe you’re going to be here, it doesn’t feel real.
ah ) It is real.
I’m nervous, I guess.
Nothing to be nervous for. As long as it is you, it is perfect
Ugh. Are you sure?
Nevermind. Don’t answer that. I’ve just never done anything like this before.
For packing: I was thinking, if you want, we could go to my lake house. But it’s far.
Outside does not matter, I will be too deep inside of you to care.
Jesus. That is so dumb, Ilya.
Have you missed me yet?
It is too easy.
--
He learns for the first time in his life how terrible it is to fly.
Ottawa airport is teeny tiny. Jane had said: it’s the capitol of Canada. Ilya had expected—something else. Not this. It’s a lot of different all at once.
He stutters through the process of ordering a coffee though he’d been practicing for weeks at this point, muttering shreds of English to himself late at night when Alexei was out and unable to bang his fist on their shared wall. Ilya puts his face under the sink in the bathroom and scrubs at his red, red eyes with the heels of his palm. He smells himself, the sweat from where the seat cushion pressed his shirt flat between his shoulder blades. There’s a dark patch of it at the base of his spine, immune to the hand dryer. Pit stains on his white t-shirt.
God, please, please let her be ugly.
Still no photo. She gave him only bland to go off of: the level of a parking garage, the numbered spot she would be waiting in, description of a nondescript Jeep Cherokee. She has bad taste. That is fine. He has almost convinced himself they will have a lousy fuck in a hotel room and then he will call Svetlana from the lobby and beg her to come get him after all. Most things do not work out and everything ends.
It’s hopeless concrete most of the way to her. Worse when he rounds a corner and the black car is in sight, parked alone in a strip of open spaces. Engine running. At home, he had told Sasha that he was going away to marry a fat ugly woman who was very, very, very rich. That she would fix his teeth. Sasha had not bothered looking away from doing up the buttons on his awful shirt. Ilya had been saying shit like that since they were kids.
That’s how it feels now. Ilya feels like a kid, eager and unready and dumb. He never has before, not even as an actual kid. It’s a brand new sensation, rising in his chest with each teetering, giddy breath. When he opens the passenger side door, the exhale is loud enough to be a laugh.
Jane looks at him like there has never been anything funny in the entire world.
Ilya smiles. His hand is very steady, shutting the door. He does not even slam it. Suddenly, it is very, very perfect to smell like such a man.
“Hi. I am Ilya.”
Jane swallows. His adam’s apple bobs as he does it, and there’s the jaw, the bulk of a body so big it feels heavy just to look at, but he has the eyes of a girl. Not only wide, not only the thick lashes just asking for a thumb to be run over them, but looking for something, too. Searching like Sveta does, taking in what’s in front of him and immediately trying to pry into what’s hiding underneath.
He’s a very big guy, as big as Ilya. Of course. Requirement of the job, but no one seems to have told him this. Ilya leans in to fill the space between them, one hand over the water bottle in his cup holder, the big Montreal team sticker on the belly. Jane hunches against the window like a caught mouse, shoulders up against the glass.
Ilya asks politely, “Should I pretend I do not know who you are?”
“This was a mistake,” Shane Hollander says, voice cracking.
The play is very, very obvious. Ilya has spent most of his life wanting to be away from it, and to do that, you need a lot of money. The man in front of him has a lot of money, and better yet, a deep appreciation for the muscles that make up Ilya’s stomach. Ilya wishes he had the texts in hand, thick, soft pieces to feed back into his frowning mouth. Remember? When you said: I like you so much, and god I feel crazy and Fuck me, fuck me harder, more, god you feel so big, so good. I can feel you—please, you’re going to make me come. Please can I come. Please, Ilya.
Always, they beg. Ilya is happier than he thought possible to fit in one body.
--
Shane Hollander has no good thing to eat in his whole home. There is an enormous fridge with very bright lights looking down on bare shelves. A cucumber. Ilya looks at him, holding the door open.
“Where is your food? I thought you were very rich.”
“It’s not—I bought snacks,” he grumbles. Looser now after the five hour drive, but only loose the way a grinding rusty gear gives up one single tooth, nowhere close to a full rotation. Ilya will get him there. All of the time in the car, the bend of his knuckles stayed bright, but still, he drove. He did not make Ilya get out, give this up, go. Shane is the same girl from Ilya’s phone: refuses to use his own hands for holding but very willing to let Ilya have anything of his.
Shane huffs past him to pull open a cabinet, well-stocked with nothing Ilya wants at all. Three days and he will need something more than bitter rations. Here, in the happy lull of luxury, want and need can be the same thing. “No, we must have better than this.”
There is an argument that works for Ilya more than any filthy thing said between them ever did. He grins and slumps across the sprawling marble countertop and Shane Hollander’s eyebrows pinch together and he grabs his keys up like he might be able to strangle the metal breathless. In the car, he produced a contract. For the rest of the world, these three days do not exist, so Ilya will spend them greedily. The door lets out a beep like a little bird chirping.
Shane Hollander goes to the grocery store for him, agreed begrudgingly to the list and insisted Ilya couldn’t come with him. Can’t be seen. It will be interesting to find which lines are stone for him and which are laid in wobbly gravel, easy to convince. Already, some: he would not look over at Ilya for the whole drive, but his throat made a small noise when Ilya made up a reason to pat the bend of his knee. Like the door chirp but sweeter, not a seal shut but a light-letting-in crack. The sound like he’d known Jane would make: something you would starve forever just to swallow once.
The shower is crazy. Big as Ottawa’s whole airport. Ilya opens every drawer in the bathroom. Finds flavors of floss he didn’t know existed, picks strings out of each and runs them over his tongue. It takes a while but he figures out how to get the tiles underfoot cheeked with heat, how the sleek silver handles of the shower turn on a sauna. Everything is butter in his palm. Shane Hollander is home again with a knock on the wall outside the open bathroom door, slung wide so the humid mouth can breathe out.
“Yes?” Ilya makes a big show of the question, leaning out into the hallway with a towel most of the way around his waist. Montreal’s star center, more than familiar with a balance board, stumbles backward.
“Jesus.” Pink licks up his cheeks like he is the one fresh out of so much steam. “Um. I’m back, I got—are you hungry? I can just…”
So pink. It is like watching fruit swell and knowing it will soon pop. Juice everywhere. Ilya lets the towel slide down another damp inch.
“What do you think I am hungry for?”
Jane rolls his eyes. Another surprise to see what Ilya had only suspected before from the flat of his palm playing out on the planes of his handsome face now: how very much he wants, how very little he wants to want. Ilya leaves the towel slumped around his waist and leaves wet footprints on the hallway runner.
--
Shane watches like a drawn moth at the edge of the room while Ilya dumps out the haul. Candy, mostly. There is a loud packet of chocolate chip cookie that he rips into first. Crumbs scatter across the marble, dark spotting the stark warmed under an endless wall of windows. Ilya stuffs his mouth. Doesn’t swallow before he’s tapping at the ruined counter and pointing at Shane.
“This looks like you.” And at the pinch that wedges itself between Shane’s brows, Ilya gestures to his own face, the full cheeks. “Freckles.”
Not a laugh, closer to a stubborn creak, a gear turning one cog gentler. Shane uncrosses his arms.
Ilya eats another, a third. It is a little bit addicting, the flat, firm relief of chocolate against the slur of sugar and butter. Sweet relieving sweet. He holds the fourth out to Shane and Shane shakes his head. Wiping his hands on the towel, watching the way Shane’s gaze drags like a tugged string after that, Ilya takes a breath big enough to swell his chest and smiles. “So.”
“Everything I said was true,” Shane bursts out with.
Another pop, another wet admission. Ilya looks up, heartbroken to see not a single part of him dripping.
“Me too.”
“Except for your name.”
“Yes, but I told, eventually. You did not ever tell me much bigger thing. Or, not so big, maybe. I do not know, yet.”
Easy, easy. Shane frowns. “You said in the car you didn’t care.”
He had. Gouged his own chest, gaping holes from all the ripped out truths. Mess, like Shane does not like. He had to. Shane kept staring even after Ilya signed it, an opaque document that promised he would not tell anyone anything. He signed the loopiest, largest version of his name and looked up to see if Shane had stolen a glance to check, if he believed Ilya was Ilya, after all, the way Ilya knew Shane even when he believed he was an ugly, shy woman. No cunt and nothing is different; still his legs will squeeze and plead and wrap around Ilya’s ears when his tongue first flicks over his little pink hole.
“I like it,” Ilya says. “You know this, already. I like you.”
But, fox. Shane’s spine straightens. Gaze very, very straight. Mouth one line, like that. If it is possible to gather the soul up into one neat stack, he has done this, too. “We should talk about money. If you’re—I’ll pay you, obviously. I figured that was why you came.”
Ilya’s eyebrows go up like he hadn’t considered it. Hadn’t been held in the leather of a passenger seat staring at the screen on his phone, clumsy searches. How much is standard rate of whores in Canada? He isn’t a professional, more hobbyist. Just asked upfront sometimes at clubs to see how much he could get. Sveta is wrong that he is vain; mostly he was surprised about the answer.
“Pay for what? Be specific, please. My English.” Ilya smirks, shrugging.
“Your English is fine.” Shane’s mouth gets tighter. Sad; he is not ugly even a little bit. “But, um. I don’t know. Sex?”
Ilya looks and looks.
Shane braces himself, puts those big shoulders into it. “I don’t know. I want whatever you want? I don’t want to do anything you don’t want to do, obviously, and I really want—god, I shouldn’t have done this. You shouldn’t be here. Is this okay? Is this—actual sex trafficking? I’m sorry, I—” Big gulp, no longer the bird chirping but the whole nest coming apart in brittle pieces. Shane’s hand fumbles for the edge of the counter and the towel is lost when Ilya hurries to catch all of him.
Too much stuffed into one moment; Shane does not notice. His eyes are stuck wide, unfocused and getting wetter by the second. Face fever pink, mouth wheezing.
“Jane.” Bigger eyes at that; Ilya thought they couldn’t get any more. He pulls him in until his face is in his neck.
“Don’t call me that.” Still so stiff. Ilya forgets; there is no relief in sweet, for him.
“Okay.” Ilya strokes down the back of his neck, nails scraping at the soft bend. “Shane. Shut up.” When he starts up again at that, Ilya increases the pressure. “Stop. I like you. I want you, and I will have you.”
Muffled breath in. “God.”
“Okay? Are you going to be good?”
A big hot exhale spent against Ilya’s neck. “Shit. Yeah, okay.”
In his arms, Shane changes. He warms like clay under Ilya’s palms, body simple and latent. All this bulk, the sheer potent power and his hands hang slack at his sides, useless until Ilya decides to pick up and use them. There is a warm solid pressure pushing up against Ilya’s stomach, Shane’s cock trapped between them and growing.
They have never been here before, and yet. Once the idea hits Ilya, it is too good a joke to keep him from clutching him closer, from his belly bouncing with the laugh and pushing up against his: they have done this before. Without knowing he was, Ilya has held him just like this. With an MLH game on the tv, Ilya uncomplicated and spoiled with his ass sunk into a comfortable cushion, watching Shane try. Watching him be very, very good.
“Don’t laugh at me.”
Ilya’s eases at the back of his neck only to grab for his jaw, make him look at his face. “No, only with you, лисичка. Only with you.”
--
The bedroom is modest for a house like this. Mostly window, mostly outside. Ilya lied. He cares a little bit about all of it.
Shane goes down on the bed so easily there’s almost no fun in it. The sight is a thrill, still, such a big thing to toss around like a paper doll. Ilya follows him down, one knee dug into the mattress on either side of his hips and two hands spread on Shane’s chest, landing heavy to shove the air out of him. Shane bites his lip but the muffle only makes the whine thicker.
“Wait,” Shane says, and Ilya stops, hands hovering with one thumb angled above the line of his jaw. “Do we need to—um, decide what’s going to happen? For payment?”
“Day rate. No more work talk, please. You will spoil romance,” Ilya says.
“Fuck you,” Shane says. Ilya licks the inside of his own teeth, tastes the smear of sweet wedged in between. One tug at the bottom of Shane Hollander’s shirt to get his stomach bared then Ilya rubs the big prone breathing slice of skin.
“I do not believe you want this,” Ilya pushes. Shane sucks in a breath and takes his belly with him, Ilya’s full hand sinking down with him. He draws a line with his thumb down the firm flesh, over the ditch of his navel and stopping right at the waistband. Low at the place the body changes, bare giving way well-kept rasping hair. His cock makes a shape just below, thick in his jeans, straining up. Over a chaste strip of stomach, Ilya strokes. “I think you said, what is it? Whatever I want.”
Ilya wants to take his time. He gets one hand under his shirt, fabric bunching at his wrist while his fingers squirm over the swell of one pec, the callus on his thumb catching a little on Shane’s nipple. The other stays low, a go-nowhere wander. He pops the button of his jeans open and doesn’t go any further.
Shane swallows and Ilya watches everything in his throat work.
“This is a big, big problem, for me. Whatever. I like to have what I want. Most of the time I have this. But here, there is so much of it. You are so much of it.”
Big breath in. Another rise under Ilya’s hand, vast and hot. It was wrong about the sun before, maybe. Ilya flushes at the sight of his face and Shane is a shock of promise, all this rising, rising. Looking at him you have to squint under so much aching bright.
“So I must choose. And this is hard because, you know,” Ilya rubs the bud of one nipple the way he said he would, fawning over it like a wet little clit. He bends to use his mouth and pulls back only when Shane can no longer keep himself from writhing. “I do not like to choose. I would rather have everything.”
Shane groans. His fist in the sheets does nothing but ruin them. It doesn’t help him when it comes to the steady bounce of his hips, rutting up against nothing because Ilya has given him nothing. Ilya watches: the pink tension pinching his face, the giddy arch his spine makes in the air. Very hard not to crumple the tease up and toss it over his shoulder right then. Ilya has been thinking of nothing but fucking him for months.
And it has been—months. It would be cruel to both of them, all the hours he now knows Shane Hollander spent with a burning face and his hand on himself, stroking with his eyes squeezed closed or straining to stay open just to watch the screen echo with whatever Ilya decided to give him.
Ilya reaches between jeans and underwear. His palm curls protectively around the wet spot on the straining fabric, the hot thickness of the head.
“You can,” Shane says, and the slow circle of pressure Ilya had been pushing down on him with stops. He looks up, and Shane’s head is back, neck arched and eyes closed. “Everything. I want to. And I have, before, it’s not my first—” throat working, he opens his eyes and tells the ceiling, “I mean, I’m not a virgin.”
It is such a virgin thing to say. Ilya can’t hold himself up any longer. The air leaves him in one plunge and he goes down, slack and heavy and all over him, on top of him, one hand trapped between chest and neck and his t-shirt, the other unable to keep from groping his cock. Pulling, a little. Shane whines again and Ilya feels the wet warmth of another smear of precome seeping out under his thumb.
Ilya forces his own mouth to run to keep from needing it just like that: to make him come like a greedy teenager, one tit sucked and palming him through his underwear, only peeling off to watch the pearl smear in the fabric, run down one thigh in a fat, glossy strip. Fuck. “No, not a virgin. You are a little bit dirty, yes? My dirty girl.”
A little unreal to feel the tension alive under him now; before Ilya only understood the sudden stiffness by reading into the sudden delay of a message, a return to correct punctuation. He made missteps with Jane. Often. More sloppy with him than anyone else.
Ilya’s eyebrows go up. “You do not want to be the girl?”
“No.”
“Really?”
“Not—not like that.”
“No? You did not like all this talk of your sticky little clit?”
Something in the eyes, darker and heavier by the second, wet with shine. Ilya is not out of practice of being with other people, and yet. He forgot it could be this way.
“You said it was fat.” The edges of Shane’s mouth curl up in a smile. Ilya digs under the waistband of his briefs, two fingers only to pinch the soft trail of hair. Near enough he can feel his fat cock twitch against his knuckle.
“You remember this?” In one sudden urge, he needs to bite the smug out of Shane’s lip until he’s bleeding. Sloppier than he is with anyone else. “Tell me, then. What else did I tell you?”
“That you would fuck me. And it seems like that’s taking a while.”
Ilya laughs. Lets it dwindle into a rough hum. Maybe Shane should come in his fucking underwear. Maybe he should not come at all.
“Only if you are a greedy slut.” Ilya grins. “Are you? I forget. Do you not need it? Need my big cock in you?”
Shane’s eyes close again and he sighs, big warm breath. Keeps them closed but otherwise eager to help while Ilya gets his pants off, his underwear. Nothing at all to bend him in half.
“Well?”
“Yes,” Shane says, arching to keep his ass in Ilya’s hand. What a fucking—fuck. “Yes, yes.”
“Yes what? You look so pretty. I forget what we are talking about.”
“Yes, I want it.”
“Is that what—”
Couldn’t be more pink until he is. “I need your dick.”
“Ah, that was it. Yes. I remember, now. I remember how you beg, too.”
Ilya palms his ass, spreads him, bites back the shiver rippling through his own spine to find Shane—wet and open. Ready for it. It is not an idea he got to have before: Jane, skin dripping in the shower, leaning a little out, a little over, bending into her own fingers. Thorough. His fingers. It is the first second Ilya feels anger over the secret.
“I just did,” Shane says, a little huff to it. Ilya lets his finger miss, skimming right over the rim.
He set lube out on the nightstand—when? This morning, before the drive? Or last night, thinking of all the photos Ilya sent. His jaw, his own greedy mouth, his red, painfully hard cock. Did Shane close his eyes, try to imagine the weight he would make on top of him? Ilya tried a few times, feeling fever-shaky and so stupid, pushing his pillow between his legs, needing him for so long his hands were heavy and numb with it, almost felt like someone else after. Almost felt like—
Shane clenches against him when Ilya forgets himself, his thumb looping lazy circles suddenly pressing in.
It feels like before, so hard he’s sick and stupid with it. “Beg me.”
“Please.” With just the fucking nail, the tip screwing the tiniest bit in. Jesus. Shane bounces up, arches into him, his body tight and pleading. “Please, please fuck me. Ilya. I need it, come on. I need you.”
Whole rising ripe dawn, all this fucking potent leaking promise. Jesus. Ilya shoves Shane’s knees up, gets them unsteady one over each shoulder, curls down. The first taste of him is so thick, clean sour and salt. Shane bucks up, buries his cock deeper into Ilya’s mouth. Head bouncing against the soft palette before he gets polite, gasps and wants and backs off. Ilya holds him hard at the hips to keep him from fucking up. He makes wet sloppy noises, doesn’t get a chance to set a pace. Shane’s nails scrape the wood of the headboard, both wrists driven into the pillow, thighs shivering and straining apart. He arches, apologizes, and comes.
“Fuck. Sorry—is it over?”
Breathless and eyes shut tight like he can’t stand to see it, still he gets the words out. Wet but so earnest, Ilya has to close his eyes, too. Sweet on sweet, so much in his mouth.
“No, лисичка. No, no.”
He can’t get a whole breath in and still Shane sits up, tries, is so, so good. His hands shake a little bit taking Ilya’s clothes off until there is nothing between them but his pink, soft, wet cock. Nothing like a clit, and still. He is not at all ugly, and still. Ilya cares so much. He can’t remember how any of this was ever funny at all.
The first finger is slow, slick, barely past the nail and Shane seizes around it. Clenches and quickly sucks Ilya in, slipping to the thick of the next knuckle. Shane shakes and apologizes again. The swell of pleasure is so sudden it chokes him; Ilya has to squeeze the root of his cock with his free hand to keep himself from coming from one finger half inside of him, that fucking voice. He’s so hot, inside. It’s so much summer here.
He hates too much heat, usually. Fucks a second finger in and find it easier to stand than the feeling from simply watching the way Shane takes it, ache and pleasure cracked and leaking all over his sweet face. Wet admission.
Inside of Ilya’s chest is his own; shattered open, knowing now. He thought the relief was having such an easy, obvious payload. He looked at Shane and thought at least this would take care of his next six months of living. Thought Shane could make the hours glisten and lavish, even, make Ilya feel worthwhile. He didn’t know it would be here, like this.
Being inside him is the relief: sudden, unbridled sweet. Ilya makes dumb noises, so happy. He looks down at Shane and can’t see the soon stomach ache, only how much there is to stuff himself with. He’s so happy he found him. That’s the relief, sweet on sweet. Ilya licks the side of his face, up the arch of his throat, eats the hum of each soft sound knocked out of him on every thrust, fucks him. Ilya fucks him and forgets for a second how his cock works, that it isn’t just this, forever, sugar rough heat and so much, so much, what is even the point of trying to breathe? Why can’t this last forever? No room in his chest, in the curling streaked heat in him, suddenly spilling and only then he remembers.
Most things do not work out, and everything ends.
--
They spend the rest of the first day in bed, sleepless rotten fruit bletting into a second, don’t get up or off of each other until it’s dinner and Shane says they should. Different from the way Ilya made him say other things for long hours before, thick confessions so that Ilya would fill his mouth up with tongue or fingers or with the cock in the drawer one time, spit dripping down silicone, Ilya really can’t believe he found him.
But he really says it, this time. Means it. The mess gets to be too much for him eventually.
He needs a shower, and then food, and then, “A break, god. I feel like my dick is chafed. I think—” the scrunch of his nose, “it feels like I’m stuck open,” and Ilya almost can’t help himself then, has to roll onto his stomach and moan against the mattress to keep from pulling Shane into his lap again, again and again, to feel for himself.
“So, tomorrow,” Shane says, sitting very gingerly on his side of the couch, feet up and turned toward him. The barely alive intelligent part of Ilya wishes he’d never come. “I can drive you back to the airport, obviously. Even with the afternoon flight, it’s a long drive, so. We should leave sort of early. Do you, um. Do you usually get up early?”
“Why do you say this?”
“What?” Shane asks. “Asking if you’re up early?”
“Do you want me to go?”
“No,” so quick and certain the echo of it makes something tender and otherwise dead in Ilya’s chest kick to life. “I want you to stay. But, I mean. You can’t.”
“Do you like me?”
“I—” Shane laughs, not really a laugh. “I don’t know you. When we met, you said you were a guy named Danny from Boston.”
“I told you, though. Ilya from Moscow,” Ilya reminds him. “I told you. You know me.”
“Yeah, but you lied. I lied. This is, you know. Not real.” Shane frowns, sets down the salad bowl he’d been picking at, half off the edge of the couch. He’s sitting a little odd on the cushion, sore. Something wide in Ilya clenches and Shane puts his hands in his lap, says not quite looking: “And you have to stop pretending you like me, now. If that’s just part of the day rate, it’s—I just don’t want that, anymore.”
“This is not pretend.”
Strict soaked into the voice, now. “I mean, it Ilya. Stop.”
--
He is different, in the mornings. Only their second together and Ilya knows him, now. He knew already.
The tension that hums in muscle for him steadier than blood has no chance to flood in yet, no unforgiving structure built to scoop him up and hold him separate from what he wants. Shane clings when Ilya pushes the sheets off in the dawn haze, getting up to piss. Grabs for him the second he gets back, skipping the crudest naked parts to calm himself with one hand on Iyla’s wrist, the other curled around the back of his neck. It’s Ilya that has to close the distance. He will not take anything—he will take everything Ilya gives him, and nothing for himself. It’s blurry to consider the extent of him. Ilya kisses him on the mouth instead of trying.
--
Every little shift of his hips in his handsome clean jeans, his handsome clean driver’s seat, feels like it belongs to Ilya. All the sugared things were left behind on the kitchen counter and the stomach ache has set in. He is so smart, this fox, and wrong. Worse for the conviction. It is real.
Ilya thought the relief would last longer. After the smeared gluttonous hours Ilya only wants everything with him still, as much of Shane as he can have and then some more, after that.
“Do you not have any more time?” Ilya asks, looking out the window at growing distance blurring past the glass. “Before pre-season.”
“Oh,” Shane says. “Yeah, well. It’s my mom’s birthday and she wanted to do a few days at this health spa, then training will get serious again. I’ve been slacking on workouts too, so, I really need to get back on track.”
“Yes, I have noticed. You are so slacking.”
Shane laughs. “What about you? Do you have plans for the rest of your summer?”
“I am staying with a friend. In Boston.”
He does not take his eyes off the road, but his brows go up. “Oh. So Boston is kind of real?”
“Shane.”
For a while there is quiet like a living animal between them. Bulky and breathing.
“Sorry. It’s—yeah. It’s embarrassing. It did… it’s not like it didn’t mean anything, to me.” He picks at nothing on the steering wheel, looks ahead. “I feel like I am going to miss you, actually.”
The confession doesn’t curl up with the rest of them, sits between them instead. Ilya can’t figure out how to keep any more of him than this. “Why did you do it? Why Jane, looking for love, on Boston reddit?”
A slightest curl at the side of his mouth. “I thought it would be safe. It has nothing to do with me, like, none of it’s true, so. Pretty untraceable. And, I thought that it wouldn’t work. That there was no way anything would come of that. It’s fucking reddit.”
“Fucking reddit,” Ilya repeats, and Shane laughs again like he had been funny. Nice noise. “Most of the business for me, on there.”
Niceness still, that voice. “Oh yeah? Why, do you think?”
“Anonymous, so, most honest. Dating profile on dating website is like an advertisement, all fake. On there it is so plain. No point in trying to paint a pretty picture.”
“But you did.”
“Not really. Inside, it is the same.” He stops, assesses the mess, makes it worse anyway. “I told my friend you were a very ugly woman that I intended to marry.”
“Because I have money.”
“Lots of people have money. You are the only one I have been on a plane for. You and your pussy.”
Shane smiles, hand gripping the steering wheel. Ilya needs the grip to ease, the car to stop. “You don’t like flying?”
“I had never, before you. And I fucking hate it.”
“Oh, wow.” Shane hums, considers, gets embarrassed and polite. “Well. Thanks for coming. Thanks for turning out to be real.”
Ilya left his hand slack in the cup holder, the emptiness of it striking. At the next sign for a gas station he asks to pull over, then asks to go further than the parking lot, around the curtain of thick pine to the overflow lot behind that.
“We can’t—” Shane says, listening anyway. Looking, with the wet shine of his lip overlicked, like he means the opposite thing. It does not feel like Ilya reaching for him when he reaches for him; sometimes there is suddenly no space between them at all, no distance, no sense there ever has been.
Shane has an obedient mouth, is open, hot under him. Ilya makes himself pull away. “Where is the contract?”
The frown is a comfortable welcome mat just past the front door, at this point. “Are you having, um second thoughts? It’s really fair. I wanted it to be totally fair. It just says—you know. Not to say anything. I’m worried, obviously.”
Eventually, eroded probably by the growing worry that he did something to pressure Ilya, that he could pressure Ilya in anyway, still pretending he doesn’t know every part of Ilya and understand him more than Ilya understands himself—Shane pulls it out, clean lines tucked into the glove box. A pen, too. “It doesn’t matter legally if you cross sections out, but we could, I mean, if there’s something that doesn’t work we could talk about it. I could draw another one up and we could sign it after, if you’re going to be in Boston? Are you? I mean, I play there sometimes.”
Ilya does not look up over the scratch of his pen. Has to go slow to get every letter right. “Are you asking to see me again?”
The engine rumbles quietly, makes the smile on him that much louder. “I guess I’d have to.”
“Hm,” Ilya considers, pretends to consider. Finishes writing and holds the sheet out to him. “My contract. Sign,” tapping the paper on the bottom, “here.”
If it takes long to read, it is only because of Ilya’s handwriting. Shane’s eyes get to the bottom and then crawl back up again, the smile stuck on his face. He looks a little stupid, happy, and something more. A shine not like before. “This is so dumb, Ilya.”
“Mhm. Sign, please. And bring the real thing to Boston as soon as you can. I am worried, obviously.”
It is nothing he has not said to him before and still Shane keeps looking and looking, searching like there is more to find. His mouth is making an odd shape. Ilya will wait at the airport for hours, maybe a day, for Sveta to get him. Figure out getting back with her, figure out the rest of his life. It does not feel so long and empty, sitting in this car. There is a next time.
At the very least, there is the envelope stuffed full, the one Shane handed him and watched Ilya pack into his bag, slipped under the passenger seat when Shane got out of the car at the gas pump. He is too polite and too good not to find Ilya after this and insist on fairness, say he must take the money, after all. Ilya is looking forward to seeing Shane how much Shane will give him, how he’ll try, the mess they could make in that effort,together. Years and years of it.
He signs his name on the uneven bottom line Ilya drew, the paper yielding to the steering wheel, an awkward dip. Pristine signature.
Hours later, on a stiff bench at the airport, Ilya eats another bright packet of sugared whatever. Sweet on sweet, should be too much. He stares at the paper in his lap. Their names look nice, together. Above them, the truth:
I like you very much. I want you. I will have you