Chapter Text
Ilya hadn’t meant to fall asleep. He made the drive from Ottawa to Montreal at 1 PM. Two hours, plus the twenty minutes he spent picking out flowers to bring him. Shane had played New York at 11:00 and won. Ilya would have bought him flowers no matter what.
When he got to Shane’s apartment, he let himself in, put the flowers in a vase, and flopped down on his bed, nosed into his flannel sheets, surrounded himself with the scent of him. Falling asleep before Shane got home would be rude, he thought, but resting his eyes for a minute was okay. Basking in the safety of his boyfriend’s bed was okay. Everything was okay.
He didn’t realize he’d dozed off until he was pulled back into consciousness by a warm hand rubbing between his shoulderblades. It was a gentle kind of waking, one where he didn’t startle, like floating up from the bottom of a swimming pool. He sought Shane’s thigh blindly and buried his face in the side of it, a silent greeting. He shuddered as Shane began combing through his hair.
“Ya skuchal po tebe,” he mumbled into the soft fabric of his shorts.
He got a hum in response, so affectionate it ached, and then his voice, just one word spoken through a sigh: “Baby.”
Ilya paused. For a brief moment, he thought Shane was trying to tease him—he rarely called Ilya by anything other than his name and on those rare, blissful occasions it was babe or honey or sir. This time felt different, the title spoken so tenderly Ilya felt flayed open by it. Baby. Why baby? Why not sweetheart or darling or angel or love? Suddenly, he wanted to hear every reason Shane deferred to that one, everything about Ilya that demanded to be described in such a way.
“How was game?” he said instead of asking.
Shane huffed out a laugh. “You weren’t watching?”
“I fell asleep.” He hadn’t. Of course he hadn’t.
“Really? I was that boring?”
“Yes!”
“Liar.”
Ilya went limp as Shane moved him to lay on his chest, squirming and wiggling until the position was just right. He liked being laid on, the heaviness and pressure holding him down, and Ilya liked laying. He liked the way Shane ran his fingers through his hair, sometimes gentle and sometimes grabbing on at the root and tugging (that, Ilya thought with a shiver of pleasure, especially that); he liked hearing Shane’s heartbeat against his ear and feeling the rise and fall of his chest as their breaths synced; he liked being held.
Now, he moaned low in his throat, a satisfied noise, and let his eyes fall closed. He felt, as he sometimes did around Shane, like a kitten purring. Hayden and Jackie got a kitten for the kids for Christmas and Ilya could still remember the purr that rattled in its little body as it curled up in his arms, much to everyone’s delight. The sound felt too big and gravelly for such a small thing, and yet it conveyed such comfort even in its gruffness.
Shane’s hand crept into his hair and began scratching at his scalp in a way that made Ilya’s eyes flutter back into his head—intensely pleasurable, yet not arousing, not now. Still, Ilya made a noise that sounded embarrassingly close to a whine. “That feels nice,” he slurred.
“Good.” Shane brushed his hair back behind his ears, rubbed the tender spots underneath, tugged playfully at his lobes. He sighed a big sigh like he often did while falling asleep and said, or rather sang, “Nap time.”
Ilya’s brain felt pleasantly broken. “Nap time,” he repeated, and realized distantly that he wouldn’t be able to do anything else but repeat, not now. There were no more words left in his peaceful mind. That was okay, he thought. Shane could share some of his.