Chapter Text
Summer 2010
Shane really doesn’t know what to do with the information that Ilya Rozanov had suggested they do this shoot together.
The two of them haven’t even actually started their MLH careers yet, and they’ve already been forced together so many times — into the same conversations, vying for the same spots, already being positioned as rivals even though they barely know each other — that he’d assumed this CCM campaign was more of the same. He’d even been kind of irritated about it — the season hasn’t even started and he already can’t get away from Rozanov. Why the hell does Ilya Rozanov want to play into it even more? Surely he’s as sick of not standing alone on his own merits as Shane is.
He’s trying not to stew on it, and he’s especially trying not to let his irritation show. Rozanov hasn’t technically done anything wrong, and they’d even had a pretty good time filming together. But yes, he’s been undeniably off-kilter ever since Rozanov said that this whole thing was his idea, and he’s trying not to let himself think too hard about what Rozanov’s motivations could be — especially since he keeps coming back to what if he knew what I was thinking, last time, which could only be very bad. But it’s probably not that. Even if Shane can’t really think of what else it would be.
By the time the shoot wraps and Shane gets to hit the showers, he’s wound tight and more than ready to get the fuck back to his hotel room and away from Rozanov. If he just gets away from him — and he will, since they’re playing in different cities and will only see each other on the ice a few times a year — then he won’t have to think about how he feels drawn to him like a magnet. Won’t have to think about jerking off to the way Rozanov had looked at him in the gym instead of thinking about his girlfriend, or how he’d broken up with her as soon as he got back to Ottawa because he was consumed with guilt about it. She didn’t ask why, and he sure as hell didn’t offer the reason.
Rozanov could have picked a shower on the other end. They’re the only people there, and he had plenty to choose from. Instead, he only leaves two showers between them and Shane’s eyes keep getting drawn to the way the water cascades down his naked body. He’s really trying to stop looking. He knows that it’s bad that he has to try in the first place. If Rozanov catches him looking, he’s done for. It’s not normal to watch another guy in the showers, and Shane needs to be normal. He needs to be normal and stop thinking about Rozanov; probably he should find another girlfriend, or at least find a way to think about literally any girl when he jerks off.
But Rozanov is so… distracting, right there in Shane’s peripheral vision, tilting his head back into the shower spray and smoothing soap suds over his muscular thighs, and — fuck, Shane is staring. His eyes, rather than snapping to the wall in front of him the way he wants them to, go to Rozanov’s face, and when they do, he finds that Rozanov is staring back at him. Fuck. And then Rozanov’s gaze lowers, and his eyebrows raise, and that’s when Shane realizes that he’s more than a little hard.
He’s mortified, even though later he’ll think about how Rozanov only spotted it because he was looking too. He’s expecting a barbed comment at best (maybe to get punched at worst), but Rozanov doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t look away, either. “Fuck off,” Shane bites out after what feels like the longest moment of his life. He turns away again, his heart pounding in his chest. This can’t be happening.
Instead of fucking off, Ilya goddamn Rozanov starts jerking himself off lazily while watching Shane. It’s the sound that draws Shane’s eyes back, more than anything, and then he really can’t look away. Rozanov’s not even trying to hide it. He has his whole body angled towards Shane, his chin tilted up almost defiantly as he strokes himself. When he nods towards Shane’s still-hard dick, Shane intends to tell him to fuck off again, but he’s mesmerized by the way Rozanov’s hand glides up and down. He wishes that he could get his hands on Rozanov instead.
When he finds his voice again, instead of ‘fuck off’, what he says is, “Not here.” As though there’s somewhere else that they can, what, jack off together? This is insane. He needs to get out of here. He shuts the water off, far more forcefully than necessary, and practically flees for the locker room. He dresses quickly, but as he’s about to put his shoes on, he realizes he needs to say something to make it clear that they can’t do this. Not just not here, but not ever, not anywhere. It was a stupid thing to say.
He waits for Rozanov to finish his shower, and when he arrives with his towel slung low around his hips, Shane busies himself with his sneakers. He absolutely does not look. He does not notice the way water trickles down Rozanov’s chest. He doesn’t think about what it would be like to chase the droplets with his tongue.
“So, uh, look, we should forget that happened in there, okay?” he says, glancing quickly up at Rozanov before remembering he absolutely cannot do that.
“Is what you want?” Rozanov says, so goddamn nonchalant. For a second, Shane hates his guts.
Shane fully intends to say ‘yes’. He needs to forget what happened, and even more so, he needs Rozanov to forget what happened. He can’t have Rozanov telling anyone that Shane Hollander got a hard-on in the locker room showers.
He intends to say ‘yes’, but what he says instead is, “No.” He swears he opened his mouth and formed the word ‘yes’, but that’s definitely not what came out. He tries again, hoping it was just some Freudian slip, but what comes out is, again, “No.”
Fuck. Fuck. Rozanov looks delighted, but Shane can barely register that past the panic attack he’s about to have. His fingers have completely forgotten how to tie shoelaces. Then Rozanov abandons his locker and walks over to him, stopping just a pace or two away.
“What is your room number?” he asks, and Shane can’t stop himself from looking up at him — more slowly than he should, his eyes insisting on lingering on the trail of hair that disappears under Rozanov’s towel.
Lie to him, he thinks wildly to himself. At least don’t tell him the truth, come on—
“1410.”
Rozanov is grinning at him now. He adjusts his towel and says, “Well, if I come to 1410 at… nine o’clock?”
Shane’s mouth is dry. He swallows and says, “I’ll open.” It’s another betrayal — he should have said ‘don’t’ or ‘I’ll tell you to fuck off’ or literally anything else. What is wrong with him?
Rozanov’s grin, impossibly, gets wider. “I’ll knock.”
His mom doesn’t insist on going out to eat or doing some Toronto sight-seeing or anything, which means Shane is free to spend the rest of the afternoon however he likes. She does ask a couple of times if he’s okay — no wonder, if he looks even a fraction as freaked out as he feels — and it turns out he can still lie to her. Thank God, because he can’t exactly confess to her that no, he’s not okay, Ilya Rozanov jacked off in front of him in the showers and he was really into it. He can’t even ask her if she knows what’s wrong with him, not without explaining way too much. She already hates Rozanov, and she’d probably hate that he even spoke to him more than absolutely necessary, let alone… everything else.
He manages to brush off her concern with some excuse about how it had been weird to be in front of the cameras all day, how he could use some alone time. She goes off to do… whatever she’s doing, and Shane spends half an hour staring at the ceiling of his hotel room trying not to have a total meltdown. Why the fuck can’t he lie to Rozanov? It’s not even like he just had a series of Freudian slips or whatever — he actively tried to say something and something completely different came out. Nothing like this has ever happened to him before. Maybe he needs to go to the hospital or something. What if it’s, like, some kind of brain injury? A brain injury that means he can’t lie to Ilya Rozanov, specifically — yeah, that sounds likely.
He eventually accepts that the ceiling is not going to provide any answers, and he goes down to the hotel’s business centre to see if the internet has any idea what’s going on with him. He ends up on Yahoo Answers, which thankfully does have people asking why they can’t lie to one specific person. The bad news is that every single person who asks gets the same answer, one that can’t possibly be true for Shane: you can’t lie to your soulmate.
Shane knows, vaguely, that soulmates exist. They’re rare, and mostly the kind of thing chick flicks are built around, but they do exist. He’s never spent any time considering whether he might have one, because most people don’t, and because he’s always been more worried about hockey. But if he had spent time considering it, he never would’ve imagined this. Rozanov can’t possibly be his soulmate. First of all, Shane’s not gay. Second, Rozanov is his rival, as decided by the media, which the MLH is playing into even before either of them play a single game. Third, Rozanov will play for Boston, and Shane cannot have a soulmate who plays for Boston. Fourth, he’d probably get thrown out of the league if they knew he had a fellow MLH player as a soulmate. So obviously it can’t be true.
He can’t find a different answer, though.
When someone comes in and selects a seat where they can see Shane’s screen, he hurriedly closes all the windows he has open and goes back to his room. At least in his room he can panic in peace. He gets room service for dinner, but he just ends up pushing it around on his plate. He can barely taste the food he does get down, even though this is a nice hotel which presumably has good food. He paces circles into the carpet, tries and fails to get comfortable in the armchair by the bed, and flips through the free channels on the TV a half-dozen times before he gives up and turns it off; nothing can distract him from the discovery he’s just made, or the question of what the fuck he’s going to do.
As the time grinds closer to nine, he realizes there’s only one option: he can’t let Rozanov know he can’t lie to him. Whether the connection goes both ways or not, he’s absolutely certain that introducing the concept of soulmates will make this far more complicated than it needs to be. He can’t deny how much he wants Rozanov tonight, but it won’t go any further. They’ll have one ill-advised hookup before the season starts and then never interact off the ice again. It’s fine.
He goes into the bathroom, stares hard into the mirror, and tries to make sure he looks normal. Like someone who’s ready to — to hook up, to have casual sex, and not like someone who’s panicking. Someone who’s marching to their doom. Someone who just found out he has a soulmate. He thinks he looks normal enough, but he’s not sure it’ll stand up to scrutiny. Hopefully Rozanov’s not going to want to do much talking.
Rozanov doesn’t want to do much talking.
He arrives a few minutes after nine. Shane pauses a moment before opening the door, play-acting like he wasn’t waiting on the edge of his seat. When the door has shut behind Rozanov, he looks at Shane a little like a lion might look at a wounded gazelle, and Shane doesn’t even bother to pretend that it doesn’t work for him. He flushes, but doesn’t look away or try to hide his face. Underneath the lion-gaze, Rozanov looks almost impressed.
“I thought you might chicken out,” he says.
“I’m not chicken,” Shane says, firmly.
He backs Shane up against a wall with a lazy grace that goes straight to Shane’s dick, takes Shane’s jaw in his hand, and kisses him. It feels right in a way he’s never experienced — is this why people like kissing? The sensation of Rozanov’s tongue in his mouth and Rozanov’s hands roaming his body feels electric, just this side of too much, and when he sinks to his knees, his mouth waters even before he actually gets Rozanov’s dick out to suck it.
This part doesn’t feel natural like kissing did — he’d had some experience with kissing, after all, and even if his prior experience had been entirely lacklustre, he still knew the mechanics. This — well, he’s received a few blowjobs, and the mechanics are pretty straightforward in theory. He doesn’t let himself hesitate. Rozanov’s already hard after only a few minutes of kissing, but so is Shane, so he can hardly judge. There’s no particular taste to it, when Shane takes him in his mouth, but there’s the weight of it, the way it fills his mouth.
He uses what he remembers of past girlfriends giving him blowjobs, and when he gets into the rhythm of it, Rozanov moves his hand from Shane’s shoulder to run his fingers through Shane’s hair. Not holding Shane there, just touching him, and Shane moans, which makes Rozanov swear from above him. He would like Rozanov to direct where his head goes, he thinks. To put enough pressure there so he’d have to make an effort to resist him, if he wanted to.
Too soon, Rozanov tells him to stop, and he pulls away. He wants to ask what’s wrong, if it was bad, but he realizes with a start that that’s a question Rozanov might want to lie about to spare his feelings. (He doesn’t strike Shane as someone who wants to spare others’ feelings very often, but he presumably wants Shane to get him off at some point tonight.) He gets to his feet in silence instead.
“Don’t want to come yet,” Rozanov says, as if he can hear Shane’s thoughts. Maybe he could see Shane’s unasked question on his face. Rozanov runs his hands down Shane’s sides, like he can’t stop touching him. “Is your first time with a man?”
Is his technique really that bad? It probably doesn’t matter that much if it is, since they can never do this again and it’s not like Rozanov can tell anyone about this (right?), but Shane still feels a stab of embarrassment. He nods wordlessly, but instead of laughing at him, Rozanov kisses him again.
“You are fast learner,” he says, and Shane flushes. Fuck, it’s probably not great news that that made his stomach swoop. A smirk comes to Rozanov’s face. “Did you like sucking my cock?”
“Yes,” Shane confesses. He almost feels like he should lie, preserve his dignity, but — well, he can’t. So. No point trying. Maybe he could have deflected and just not answered, but that only occurs to him after he’s already spoken.
Rozanov’s smirk widens, and it looks almost gleeful around the edges. “Want me to get on the bed and let you do it more?”
Instead of immediately blurting out a ‘yes’, Shane huffs out a disbelieving laugh and says, “Let me?” It’s slightly undercut by the fact that he’s already walking Rozanov backwards towards the bed. He must have done stuff with a man before — surely no one can fake this kind of confidence. Perhaps it’s even another player, but he stops himself just as he opens his mouth to ask; that’s the kind of thing you lie about, at least for safety. And he really doesn’t want Rozanov to try to lie.
When they’re both naked on the bed, Rozanov asks, “So… what do you want to do?”, and Shane doesn’t even bother to answer out loud. He shifts down the mattress and takes Rozanov back into his mouth. Even if he is bad and inexperienced, he can’t deny that this is what he wants to do.
Maybe this angle is better for Rozanov somehow, because he makes more noise while Shane sucks him. This time, it does feel a little like his hands are directing Shane’s head, still more gentle than he imagined but it’s not as if he can ask him for more — he hardly needs to give Rozanov even more ammunition against him. Thank God his mouth is occupied so he can’t start blurting out truths like I think I want you to fuck my mouth. (Is that how it works? Do you just start blurting things out? It can’t be, because if it was, this would’ve all come to a head back in that hotel gym in Los Angeles. Whatever.) It’s not that long before Rozanov is pulling Shane off him and coming, hand working his own dick, and Shane lets himself settle against Rozanov’s shoulder to watch. He only thinks to glance up at Rozanov’s face at the end, and for a moment, he thinks next time I should watch his expression as he comes before sense slams back into him. There’s no next time. They’ll probably never see each other off the ice again, except perhaps at All-Star games. That should be a relief — it’s the knowledge that he’d been clinging to before Rozanov had shown up. It shouldn’t make his stomach twist horribly, but it does.
The twisting gets worse when, after a brief kiss, Rozanov makes like he’s going to leave. Maybe it’s good for Shane that he’s not going to reciprocate, because then he can be secure in the knowledge that Rozanov is an asshole who wouldn’t even get him off, so there’s no point in thinking about seeing him again. Although maybe it says something about him that his soul is apparently tied to an asshole who won’t even get him off. (He refuses to think about how giving Rozanov pleasure was more fun than any orgasm he’s ever had.)
It’s almost a disappointment when Rozanov, instead of leaving and giving Shane extra motivation to never want to see him again, rolls on top of him and informs him that he was teasing. Then he says, “Let me show you how to do this good,” which answers whether he’s been with men before.
Surely blowjobs shouldn’t be different depending on the gender of the person doing it. Shane’s been given good blowjobs before! But somehow, the fact that it’s Rozanov makes all of Shane’s nerve endings feel electric. He can’t control his mouth, and his hands have curled into Rozanov’s hair of their own accord. He lasts an embarrassingly short time, but he was already so worked up from giving Rozanov a blowjob that he can’t stop himself. He tries to warn Rozanov, but Rozanov doesn’t move, just sucking him through it and swallowing. It is, unfairly, extremely hot. His past girlfriends (okay, two, he’s had two girlfriends) never wanted him to come in their mouths, which is completely fine — the texture is probably unpleasant — but holy shit. Fuck. What the fuck. Is he really into the way Rozanov just swallowed it, or is it because his soulmate did it, or — no, no, those are the only two options. It has to be one of those.
Rozanov waves off his apologies and settles down beside him on the bed, and Shane can’t help himself — he rolls onto his side and says, “You’re not going to tell anyone, right?”
“Me?” Rozanov sounds disbelieving. He rolls his eyes and says, with what Shane’s pretty sure is heavy sarcasm, “Yes, Hollander, I’m going to tell everyone.” Apparently sarcasm doesn’t count against whatever fucked up soulmate rules the universe has imposed on them, because Rozanov doesn’t look like he’s having some kind of startled revelation. Shane will look it up when he gets home, just to check.
“No one can know,” Shane insists. He wants Rozanov to confirm for real, to promise him, not to brush it off like it’s a joke. Maybe Rozanov thinks he could weather it, but Shane knows it would be the end of his career. He already has so many eyes on him, the first Asian-Canadian to be drafted in the top three, and there just can’t be another thing about him. Especially not before he’s ever gotten to skate on MLH ice and prove that he fucking belongs there.
Rozanov mutters something in Russian and says, “Hollander, look, I’m not going to tell anyone. Okay?”
“Okay,” Shane says, hoping he sounds calm.
When Rozanov says he has an early flight and needs to go, Shane agrees, and absolutely has no thoughts about wanting Rozanov to stay longer as he dresses to leave Shane’s room. Once he’s left, Shane swears into the empty room. What the fuck did he just do? Why the fuck did he do it? At least it won’t happen again. He won’t let it.