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Are you sure? Hollander’s message says, and Ilya sets his phone down. It’s an unnecessary question. He’s already sent over the details. He’ll arrive at the cottage tomorrow. He’ll work out first thing in the morning and then drive over. It won’t be a long drive. He’s plotted out the route. The weather will be nice. Summer is fast approaching.
He still hasn’t canceled his ticket back to Moscow, despite what he’s told Svetlana.
###
The first time he looked at a boy and wanted, Ilya had been twelve, trembling through a series of pliés. Ilya, his coach had pronounced, possessed a weak core. He needed more power, more drive in his hips. Ballet was the answer.
What Ilya hadn’t expected: A boy two years older, with dark brown hair and darker eyes, with legs that made Ilya think of gazelles. Of the kind of animal that plucked its way across the snow without even thinking of grace. The boy made Ilya feel inadequate. He made Ilya feel warm, like someone had stirred up fear in his belly and turned it molten.
The boy must have known Ilya had been watching him, because one day he offered to correct Ilya’s form, darting a glance at Ilya’s mouth, before nudging him carefully. Shoulder to shoulder. Arm to arm.
At the end of the class, there’d been a performance. Pageantry, really. And Ilya’s father had noticed. His father must have caught the way Ilya had craned his head towards the boy throughout the show, his father must have realized, he must have, because the next day his father announced they were going to go on a day trip. They drove out, just the two of them, far outside the city, until all around them there was nothing but snow.
It had been cold. It had been snowing. The world was white on white, a blanket on top of another blanket. And it was just Ilya and his father. His father looked small; Ilya felt smaller. His father’s breath came out in great terrible puffs. He lit a cigarette, grimaced, looked up at the gray sky. The medals on his uniform glinted.
For a while they stood like that. Father and son and the whispering wind. Ilya stayed silent. He stared at his boots. At the climbing snow. There was no use speaking unless spoken to, and with every minute he wondered. What was he supposed to do? What was his father trying to say?
Finally, when Ilya couldn’t stand it any more, he blurted out, “What’s the matter?”
His father glanced at him. Eyes puck-black.
“What you want, you need to put it away. It needs to disappear.”
The words were low. A rumble, really. Ilya suddenly wanted his mother. He wanted to puke. But his father wasn’t done. He placed a hand on Ilya’s arm, the same one that boy had touched, and he said, “You can’t want. There’s no room for wanting.”
He walked back to the car. Ilya followed. And that was that.
###
“What do you want?” Hollander says. It’s the first thing that’s out of his mouth—his mouth, which is attached to the rest of him, white t-shirt, gray sweats. Ilya bites down something cutting and clever (how much do you pay your stylist again?), and follows Hollander into the kitchen and leans against the island.
“Well?” Hollander asks. He gestures at the bright titanium fridge behind him.
Ilya shrugs. “Whatever.”
“Here, then.” Hollander waggles a can at Ilya’s face.
Ilya takes it, schools his face into something next to neutral when their fingers brush. They’re warm, Hollander’s hand is warm. What a wonderful fact, Svetlana would say wryly, and Ilya shakes his head and Hollander’s hand retreats and then it’s just Ilya’s palm and the cold sweating can.
Ilya turns so he’s facing the rest of the kitchen. He takes in the wide ceiling beams and the blonde hardwood floors and the dining table set for a party of ten, complete with candlesticks and blue cloth napkins. A set of four additional upholstered chairs line the far wall.
Ilya scrunches up his nose. “Did you hire the same designer?”
“Huh?”
“The same woman who did your apartment.”
Hollander flushes. “Yeah.”
Ilya takes a sip of the ginger ale. It’s cold and sweet, it reminds him of an old ballet studio decades past its prime, of that older old boy and then Sasha and then all the boys and girls who came after. He gives a quick nod at Hollander, who’s looking at him with something like curiosity.
“So are there a dozen miniature cushions on your bed?” Ilya hears himself ask, and he earns a laugh for that.
“Let me give you the grand tour.”
“No need. We have time.”
Hollander gives him another curious glance, but doesn’t say anything. They continue taking sips of ginger ale. The kitchen island is a smooth flat surface between them. Hollander keeps looking, he keeps looking without saying anything at all, he takes a sip and then he looks up through his lashes, as if this is all perfectly normal. Ilya swallows and returns the stare. His entire body feels like a sprained ankle bursting its way out of a skate. It’s real, he supposes. That’s what’s weird, that’s what’s odd. This is real. This, after years of hotel rooms and back doors and grimy fucking bathrooms. They’re here in the fucking daylight with nothing left unsaid.
“Well,” Ilya says. He takes one last gulp of the can, shakes it so Hollander knows it’s empty, and nods at the path to the living room and the porch beyond. “I’m going to take a walk.”
Hollander gawks, but Ilya shrugs a shoulder. “What, I can’t go outside? You are going to keep me indoors all week?”
“No, no, just—”
“Calm down, Hollander. I just want to stretch my legs.”
###
There’s a pond at the edge of the property. The mosquitoes are evil. Ilya does a loop and then he heads back to the cottage. The sun beats down until sweat blushes across his chest. This time last year he was running through Boston, with his bags packed for Moscow. With his not-dead father and his not-estranged brother waiting for him on the other side of a twenty-hour journey.
Now his father is dead. Now Alexei is quiet. Now, now, now.
He’s silent when he returns. Hollander raises his eyebrows, he’s folding laundry, placing clean underwear in neat little piles on the enormous living room couch. He doesn’t push. Just begins talking about Pike and his herd of children before moving on to who might be traded and then dumb things like TV shows and celebrities Ilya either hasn’t heard of or hasn’t cared enough to read up on.
When Hollander runs out of things to say, Ilya closes the distance between them, comes up close, till they’re face to face.
“Gym?” he asks.
“Sure.”
###
Where is the ballet dancer now? Ilya doesn’t think he can summon up the boy’s face. He can only dredge the fuzzy memory of a taut leg in blue tights and the burn of his arm jangling into another’s.
###
Hollander’s little private gym is pristine. There’s a squat rack in the corner, yoga mats underneath an enormous LED clock, a bench, a rack of kettlebells. Hollander takes the hex bar and Ilya takes the rowing machine and then they switch.
They’ve known each other long enough that working out can be done with little more than grunts. Ilya pounds out a set of five, then another set of five, then another. He gives himself a minute to rest in between. The knurling of the hex bar eats into his palms, and he grips it tighter.
He doesn’t look at Hollander, who’s grunting in time, who’s turning the rowing machine into some sort of orchestral instrument with its loud rushing jugular sound. Ilya grits his teeth. He likes this, he tells himself. It’s better than running alone through a park, it’s better than running and then checking his phone, it’s better than walking around with a weight in his gut. A good clean workout. Just the two of them, like Hollander had promised.
Ilya’s unloading the bar when a towel is being waved in his face like a flag. Hollander beams at him.
“For you,” he says, like it’s a gift.
Ilya accepts it. “You finished already?”
“I mean, you’re done, right?”
“Finishing at the same time, that is generous of you.”
“Fuck you.”
Ilya only narrows his eyes. But Hollander doesn’t seem to care, he takes a long careless gulp from his water bottle before catching Ilya’s gaze, and only then do his eyes narrow back. He swallows, long and slow. Slow and deliberate.
Ilya huffs. He stands, slaps the towel across a shoulder, exaggerates a turn towards the door.
“I will shower now,” he says.
“Bathroom’s second door on your right.”
###
Hollander slips in because Ilya expects it and because there is no wrathful god, only a god that must be amused by how much Ilya likes cock, or at least by how much Ilya likes Hollander’s mouth on his cock.
The steam makes things hazy, like the act itself is already a memory. But Ilya clenches his hands in Hollander’s hair as his cock finds the back of a warm, lax throat. Hollander moans. Hums around Ilya’s cock like he’s studied what Ilya likes. One hand comes up and begins to play with Ilya’s nipples and it’s the combination of the sight and the sensation that has Ilya closing his eyes and gulping and trying not to come.
He does, though. He does, soon enough, and Hollander already has a hand around his own cock and so he comes too, and he looks at Ilya for what must be the hundredth time today, and this time he looks at Ilya like they’re in on some secret joke.
“Guess you were right,” he says. His mouth is very red, almost purple.
“Right about what?”
“Finishing at the same time. Guess I’m generous after all.”
Ilya scoffs. The water is too hot. Hollander’s neck is violently pink but Ilya likes it, likes how it burns, and he pulls Hollander up and presses him against the bathroom wall and kisses him hard, till their teeth knock together, till his chest and Hollander’s chest are moving in sync, like they’re both on the ice and they’re one heaving prowling animal.
They manage to get each other off once more before the water runs cold. And then they’re toweling themselves dry and Hollander is looking at him with an open expression, like just being here with Ilya is a good, happy, normal thing. It makes Ilya’s guts twist. He wants, he thinks. He really wants.
But his mouth moves first.
“Where’s the guest room?”
Hollander blinks. “The guest room?”
“Yes, Hollander. The room where your guests sleep. Where is it?”
Something shutters in Hollander’s face. “Past the kitchen, on your left.” His jaw squares up, his shoulders pull back. He looks like the photos in his early Rolex ads, when he first started getting big, when it seemed everywhere Ilya looked, there he was, Mr. Perfect, with his perfect press responses and his perfect mouth and his perfect family.
###
There are no fewer than six cushions on the bed. Ilya tosses them to the side and lies face down, nose squashed into the pillow. He tries not to think about it. The way Hollander looked on his knees. The way Hollander’s shoulders felt in his hands. If Ilya squeezed tight, Hollander would only lean into the sensation—it’s a fact, Ilya knows this to be true.
Outside the sun is sinking and the day flushes till the ceiling is the color of Hollander’s lips. It isn’t fair, Ilya thinks. He’s being weird. He’s being stupid and irrational. He was the one who practically invited himself over. He’d seen Scott Hunter kissing that man, and he’d just—he’d picked up the phone. If Scott could do it, he’d thought, and he hadn’t finished the thought.
But now he’s here and it’s real and the want in his belly is clawing at him. It’s normal, it’s okay, he can hear Hollander say, except they’ll both know it’s not really a lie, just filler words that Americans say to make themselves feel better.
This is what Ilya knows: Nothing good comes from wanting. Hollander’s cottage is nice, his floors are new and his laundry is clean and his shower has decent water pressure. Hollander’s mouth is nice and his cock is nice and he’s nice, he’s nice all the way through. But Ilya isn’t nice and Ilya has spent his whole life trying not to want, because showing someone what he wants is no different from carving out his soul from his chest and gifting it away in the hopes that it’ll be tucked away, safe and warm. Wanting is no different from getting into a car and driving far away from the city and knowing that he’ll never be able to make it back home on foot.
Ilya squeezes his eyes shut. He listens to Hollander make calamitous noise in the kitchen. After a while, he thinks he smells tomato sauce. His stomach grumbles and so he pads out, watching Hollander’s eyes darken when he realizes Ilya’s stolen one of his shirts. But Ilya is in no mood to talk; he scarfs up the pasta (did Hollander learn how to cook yesterday? The pasta gums up in his mouth) before grunting out a goodnight.
In the guest room, Ilya brushes his teeth in the fancy en suite bathroom. Examines himself in the full-length mirror. He looks the same. The same son who buried his father. The same man who fucked Hollander in another bedroom designed by the same awful interior designer. He remembers that night, the way Hollander had looked at him with something akin to tenderness, the way Hollander had ducked down and kissed him like something good had come out of all of that wanting. Like having Ilya’s cock inside him was magic. Ilya’s hand grazes the waistband of his pajamas, but he doesn’t dip down.
In the hallway, a floorboard creaks. Ilya tenses, listening. He imagines Hollander standing outside the room, imagines Hollander waiting for Ilya to invite him in, imagines Hollander palming himself as Ilya does the same. One wall separates them, this too is a fact Ilya knows.
He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t make a sound. Eventually, he thinks he hears footsteps, but they don’t get closer. They only fade away.
###
Two weeks. One day down, thirteen to go. Ilya wakes up and his weird mood, the weight in his gut, it’s all still there. He skips breakfast, heads to Hollander’s beautiful gym, arranges a workout circuit that has him gasping at the squat rack like a fish out of water.
Hollander finds him as he’s wobbling his way towards the kettlebells.
“Hey.”
“Hey yourself.”
Hollander is dressed in a different pair of sweats and possibly the same white shirt. There’s a splotch of tomato sauce near the armpit. It makes Ilya want to nuzzle his face in and take a deep whiff.
He’s too obvious. Hollander notices, steps close. He has his hands on Ilya’s shoulders just as Ilya drops to his knees and pulls down Hollander’s stupidly thick sweatpants. They feel expensive. Soft and nice. He breathes in, hears himself breathe in. All those months he jerked off alone, with the water branding his back, with his hand sore and his cock no different, it’d been to this. To the weight of the cock nudged up against his mouth.
Hollander echoes the noise. “Ilya,” he says quietly. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah.”
###
Moscow in the summer: the heat as sturdy and constant as a thick brick wall. Ottawa is similar, yet somehow profoundly worse. Ilya will never get used to it. The mosquitoes by the little pond chase after him like they’re holding a grudge, as if their ancestors were enemies once. Ilya smacks one across the back of his palm but it’s too late, the skin welts up. He scowls. There’s a stupid bird that keeps making a stupid wailing noise. He cranks up the music on his phone.
He should be running. Last year, he was running and checking his phone for Hollander’s texts and running some more and partying with Svetlana.
Someone taps him on the shoulder. Ilya whips around, pulls out his earphones.
“Hollander.”
“That’s me.”
Hollander squints, as if doing so might help his hearing. “What are you listening to?”
“Russian girl band. Pretend lesbians.” Ilya waves his hand in the air, but no other words come to describe t.A.T.u.
“No, no,” Hollander says, insistent. “I know this song. I’ve heard it played before.”
“Yes, and?”
Hollander gives him a strange look. “Nothing. Just—it sounds familiar.”
Ilya resumes his walk around the pond. Better to move now than to get bit. But the mosquitoes don’t seem to like Hollander. Or maybe he’s immune to mosquitoes, and these Canadian mosquitoes have something against Russians.
“It was playing that night,” Hollander says after a moment. He sounds thoughtful, he’s scrunching up his nose, his freckles have begun to darken. In a few months Ilya will be able to count them from across the room. More than half a dozen years of playing. More than half a dozen years of circling each other.
“The song, that night at the club,” Hollander says, like he’s cracked a code. “I remember it. It was playing at that club, you were there, do you remember? I was still with…and you were…”
Ilya’s mouth turns up on its own. “You need to work on your English.”
“You’re an asshole.”
“No, you.”
They do a lap around the pond. The mosquitoes have begun to swarm. Summer in Ottawa, Ilya thinks, is utterly miserable. Hollander matches him step by step. Every few seconds he chews on his bottom lip, like he has something to say but doesn’t know how to say it. Like a steak that isn’t quite ready, like if Ilya bit down Hollander would bleed. Ilya stays quiet. What Hollander wants, Hollander usually gets.
“Is this what we’re going to do?” Hollander finally says. It comes out more resigned than Ilya expects.
“What do you mean?”
“Like, are we just going to train and suck each other off? Is this it?” Hollander looks vaguely shocked by his own words but recovers after a moment. “I’m not complaining. But we haven’t talked. We’ve barely—we’ve barely had like, a full conversation.”
Ilya feels himself stiffen. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, we need to talk about what we’re going to do. Like, how we’re going to go about this.” Hollander waves a hand in the air, as if he can magically summon the answer he’s looking for. “I want to know what you want. Like, what you said, about Russia. About not being able to go back, if—-
“I don’t want anything.” It comes out flat. Ilya fixes his gaze on the trunk of an oak tree behind Hollander. He thinks he catches sight of the stupid and loud bird.
“Ilya…”
“Hollander. I—I came. Here. Just the two of us. What more do you want?”
“You,” Shane says, easy like it’s breathing.
Ilya blinks. He wants—the words are there, they’re surging up from his belly into his chest into his throat, and it’s all he can do to swallow it all back down. He can still feel the wind, he thinks. He can still see the white of the snow and the gray of the sky.
“Like I said,” he manages, “I’m already here, Hollander.”
###
Hollander manages to pull him into a shrub on the walk back to the cottage, which if Ilya is honest, is more of a compound. The shrub is not comfortable. But Hollander’s mouth finds his and the kiss is long and slow and sweaty. Ilya presses his thumb against the spray of freckles, wondering if they might smudge off if he followed the thumb with his tongue. A great big lick.
“I want you,” Hollander whispers.
“Yeah.”
A mosquito lands on Hollander’s cheek. Ilya’s thumb finds it, bats it away. But when he brings his thumb back to that spot, five freckles, one, two, three, four, five, there’s a spot of blood in the mix, beading up.
“Everything okay?” Hollander asks, and it’s an annoying question, Ilya doesn’t want to answer it, doesn’t deign to. He leans in. He palms Hollander’s cock.
“Ever been fucked out in the woods, Hollander?”
###
What do you want?
The next few days, Hollander says it like it’s his favorite question, like he knows what the question is doing to Ilya. What do you want? Do you want water? Do you want to watch something? Do you want to go for a run? Do you want to fuck?
They fuck in every room. The grand tour: Hollander’s bed, the guest bed, the showers twice more, the kitchen island. Ilya presses Hollander’s face into the ridiculously large couch. Guides himself in, hand in the small of Hollander’s back, the fireplace staring back at them, staring at the way Hollander’s ass bobs like this is what it’s meant to do, like Shane’s found himself, like Shane wants Ilya to—
They fuck on the porch, with Hollander’s mouth wet and drooling. Two of Ilya’s fingers pumping in and out. They fuck in the walk-in pantry, with Hollander spreading himself across a stool, grinning lazily, forcing Ilya to watch one and then two and then three fingers disappear.
They fuck with Hollander’s mouth sucking on Ilya’s throat, with Hollander going uh-uh-uh and Ilya biting down a curse. They fuck in the basement, slowly, across the dry cool cement floors. Hollander inhales raggedly because Ilya refuses to hurry up, he likes it slow like this, so slow it’s almost painful, like the want is only a purely physical thing, a simmering slither underneath his skin. Hollander begins to pant out Ilya’s name, Ilya, he goes, just Ilya as his thighs tremble around Ilya’s shoulders, and Ilya swallows hard and he keeps the pace, he keeps steady until he can feel his cock leaking, until the pleasure grips him tightly, has his throat in a vise, the way being on the ice feels after a long game, the pain hurtling from his lungs to his chest to his quads, and Hollander claws at his arms, crying out Ilya like what they have between them, like what they have between them has actually grown into something more, into something Ilya hasn’t dared to want, hasn’t let himself want—
###
Ilya makes up an excuse so he can shower off by himself. He runs the water cold. Imagines himself as a shelf of snow. When he’s on the ice he’s a stick and a pair of eyes and a magnet chasing the puck. What he wants is what everyone else wants, what he wants is what his teammates want, what he wants—everyone knows what he wants when he’s on the ice. He wants to score. He wants a goal. He wants a hat trick. He wants to carve his way past a body and then another body, he wants to look out before him and trace the path that’ll get him there, to what he wants. The air tight with a thousand other barely held breaths. Half the crowd chanting Rozanov, the other half booing. His hips and his knees and his ankles and his skates all in perfect alignment.
When he’s on the ice, every single part of him hums with that one want, that one approved want, the want that he’s honed so sharply over the years. It’s a sanctified want, it’s a want that hangs around his neck. It’s the want that’s propelled him here.
Sometimes after practice he thinks about Vegas. About the time he tried to grab the other want, this other want, this unsanctioned want, with both hands. He’d bargained with himself, he’d bargained with Hollander in that bathroom, hadn’t he. Thrown out, If you win MVP, I’ll blow you, fuck you, whatever you want. What had Hollander said? He’d looked at Ilya like he wasn’t sure if he was being serious. And if you win, Hollander had finally asked, and Ilya hadn’t said anything, there wasn’t anything to say, what Ilya wanted then had been immaterial, he had wanted too much, they had been dancing around each other for too long and he’d needed it to stop.
He’d been weak though. He’d won MVP and he couldn’t stop himself. Ilya thinks about that sometimes, how weak he was, how he’d texted Hollander despite knowing he shouldn’t have.
He’d wanted it all. He’d gotten greedy. A theme, wasn’t it. Number one draft pick but it wasn’t enough. A fat paycheck, enough to pay for his father’s care but it wasn’t enough. MVP but it wasn’t enough. No, he’d wanted more. He’d wanted Hollander sprawled out, gaping, three fingers in and a fourth, and he’d had it because he let himself want, had let a small animal noise escape from his chest.
I need…, Hollander had said. And Ilya had craned in. That animal under his skin leaping forward. Tell me, he’d allowed himself to say and Hollander had just offered himself up, had said You? like it was a question before completing the thought, before giving it weight. I need you.
That was the difference, maybe. Shane needed him then. He’d wanted Ilya. The need, the want—it’d been the same animal. Ilya had wanted too.
But what Ilya needs and what Ilya wants have always been two separate beasts.
###
Hollander announces he’s ordering in Chinese because he’s lazy. He’s put on something dumb on the TV, a reality TV show where contestants decide whether to get engaged after three months of talking.
It’s very American. It’s very boring. Ilya can’t stop watching. Do these people really believe they’re in love? He finds his way onto the couch, allows Hollander to nuzzle his way onto his shoulder.
At the commercial break, Hollander doesn’t move. Just buries his face deeper.
It’s awkward, Ilya knows. These two weeks should be sweet. They should be laughing more. He should be feeling free—he should be feeling good. Hollander has gotten over his hang-ups. He isn’t leaving. He wants Ilya here. There are no games, no nosy teammates, no reporters waiting on the other side.
But Hollander wants more. This, Ilya knows with an unshakeable sense of doom. Hollander will want more. What they have now, these two weeks, it’ll be enough for a while. It may be enough for a few seasons. But they’re in their prime. Hollander won’t be going away anytime soon. Ilya won’t either. And at a certain point—one day in the future—Ilya is going to wake up to Hollander looking at him with a want that Ilya can’t give. And then Hollander will say, Maybe this was a mistake. He’ll apologize for nothing. And Ilya will say, Yes, this was a bad idea, and Hollander will say, I know, I don’t want this after all. I want to be with someone who can really be here. Who doesn’t have to hide. Who wants what I want. And Ilya will nod and he will say, Yes, you’re right.
Those weeks when the press couldn’t get enough of Hollander and Rose—Ilya should have learned his lesson then. He should have. He looks down at Hollander’s face and imagines that mouth moving around Sorry.
###
Svetlana calls him. She wants him to tell her about the cottage. Has Hollander made any grand declarations of love? How is the sex? Is Ilya finally happy?
“It’s not like anything has changed,” he tells her, and she must hear it in his tone because she takes a deep breath and tells him he’s being stupid.
“You’re not going back,” she says slowly. “We both know this. Of course—of course there is the media. But that can be managed. There are ways.”
She sounds like she’s afraid of saying the wrong thing. “You need to stop thinking so hard,” she says after a moment. “All these years, Ilya. They’re not nothing. There’s nothing in Russia for you. Your father is a pile of bones. You’re not. What do you want with Hollander? What do you want?”
Ilya licks his lips. He rubs the back of his hand. “You’re beginning to sound like an American.”
Svetlana isn’t so easily swayed. “What do you want?” she prods again, and Ilya doesn’t have an answer. They both know what he wants. They both know how much he wants.
###
He cancels the plane ticket, at least.
###
On the seventh day, Ilya jokes over breakfast that the clock has run halfway out.
Shane looks up with confusion and for a moment Ilya wonders if he’s fucked the English, but then the meaning sinks in and Shane frowns.
“What do you mean by that?” Shane says. He sets down his spoon, pushes away his oatmeal, and comes to a stand. He walks around the island.
He has Ilya cornered before he realizes it.
“What?” Ilya tries to bluff.
“What do you mean by the clock running out? After this week, you’ll still, we’ll still—” The hurt in Shane’s face is surprising. It slams something loose in Ilya’s chest. But it’s true, isn’t it. They have seven more days and then it’s the real world. Then it’s Shane going out into the real world with a newfound understanding of what he wants and having the freedom to act on it. If Scott Hunter could, Shane Hollander can—isn’t that why Ilya’s here to begin with? A test of sorts.
“Ilya,” Shane says. He’s suddenly shaking his head. The sun is beaming in through the skylight, it lights up the shape of him, turns his edges silver.
Ilya swallows. “Hollander.”
“I don’t know what you’re thinking,” Shane says. “But I want this.” His brow furrows. Yesterday Ilya had pressed his forehead against that spot like it was his to have. “I’ve never been so sure. I want this, but I’m not stupid. These next few years…as long as we…I know we can’t, not in public. But us. You. I want you.”
The words land. They hit their target. Ilya lets them. He sees the thing that Shane is trying to get at. The impossibility of it. The both of them, underneath the same blanket of snow.
“Tell me,” Shane says. His voice all jagged. His face looms close. The color in his cheeks runs high and he says it again, says, “Tell me. Just tell me what you want.” He looks confident, he looks so sure. He looks nothing like the boy that had walked up to Ilya years ago and given him a hand to shake. Even then Shane had looked at him and wanted, hadn’t he.
“I’m no good at wanting,” Ilya hears himself say.
“I don’t care. Tell me anyway. We’ll work it out. You know we will. God, Ilya. You just—just tell me.”
Snowmelt, sweetness in his mouth. The easy slice of Shane’s skates and his across the rink.
It’s too big now, the wanting. Ilya can feel it bubbling out of him. It’s impossible to slough off. He knows, he’s known all along. This was never his to control. He may as well have bared himself that first time in the showers, or that night in Vegas, or any of these nights, really, what difference would it have made. He knows. Shane knows.
Ilya thinks of all the years between them, the years spent wanting each other. The spiraling message threads, the stolen kisses, the stairwells, the endless parade of hotel rooms. He thinks he sees something imperious in Shane. Something burning. He thinks he sees the contours of what they might be able to have, he thinks if he just says it, if he finally says it, maybe now it will happen. Maybe now is the time to acknowledge it.
“I want,” he says, swallowing. “I want you too.”