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Shane had been so sure they had slotted head screws in the toolbox. He’d taken everything out and rearranged it twice at this point, but it looks like he’s going to have to drive to the hardware store sometime tomorrow or the day after.
It’s a late night in June, and a Dragon’s Den rerun is playing softly on the TV. He can hear his mom and Ilya whispering and laughing loudly about something before shushing each other, and then laughing again after a couple beats of silence.
“Dad,” he calls out as he snaps the box shut, walking it to the doorway so that nobody trips and hurts themselves on it. “The boat’s going to have to wait for a couple of days—”
Two voices shush him very loudly.
“He is sleeping, Shane,” his mom calls out, not any quieter than Shane had just been.
“Yes, he is sleeping, Shane,” Ilya echoes.
Shane walks over to them, sees that they are huddled together under one of the throw blankets on the two seater, and his father is out cold on the big couch. The bottle of vodka and the bottle of wine at their feet look incriminatingly more empty than they had been an hour ago.
“Come here,” Ilya croons, reaching out over his mom’s lap for him. “Come sit.”
“You did not tell me Ilya was into yarn crafts,” his mother’s tone is accusatory as he takes his place next to his boyfriend— boyfriend, he’s twenty eight years old getting flustered about the word boyfriend.
“He is not,” Shane tries to take a corner of the blanket for himself, but is unsuccessful.
“I know how to knit,” Ilya shakes his head in disagreement as he speaks. “I was saying that this blanket is so nice, and you did not tell me that your mother made the one at your cottage too. And now you are trying to take it.”
“I’m cold,” Shane complains, to which Ilya hooks his arms underneath his and hauls him onto his lap in response to, before trying to rearrange the blanket so that all three of them could fit.
“I will take David’s,” his mom announces, standing up to take the throw that had been haphazardly tossed onto his poor sleeping dad.
Ilya is wrapping him up and smiling up at him with lazy eyes and flushed cheeks, the ringlets on one side of his head very frizzy, and it’s hard to focus on anything else. Shane likes when he looks boyish more than anything; all the tension in his face gone, pupils black and blown out against the light blue of his eyes. He almost wants to reach back in time and grab a baby version of Ilya, just to see and swaddle and place into a cradle with a bird themed hanging crib toy.
“Hello,” Ilya digs his chin into the top of Shane’s head. “We are talking about you. Yuna is going to give me present.”
“What present?” Shane asks, but then his mother is showing Ilya something on her phone, and he’s ignored as they sink into a nonsense conversation.
He can feel Ilya’s heart beat steadily in his chest, and Shane can’t imagine how he’s gotten here, how he’s managed to have everything he’s ever wanted and never even knew he needed. He wonders what an eighteen or nineteen year old version of him would think seeing this; his mother trying to and butchering the pronunciation of different zoo animals in Russian while Ilya says so close, so close to her reassuringly when she is not very close at all.
“Pay attention Shane,” his mom calls out to him, angling the phone so Shane can also see it.
“Yes, pay attention Shane,” Ilya parrots.
Ilya is such a fucking suck up with her. It makes his chest turn inside out with giddiness.
“What will you do when your kid speaks better Russian than you?” his mom asks. “You need to know these things.” An anteater pops up on the screen.
“Murav'yed,” Ilya offers.
“Murav'yed,” his mom copies, and Ilya flashes her a thousand gigawatt smile.
“When is my kid going to need to address an anteater in Russian?”
His kid. His and Ilya’s Russian speaking kid. His mind flashes back to baby Ilya, blonder than he is now and in a cobalt blue jumper. Their kid would speak French too. Their trilingual kid.
“These things can happen,” Ilya mutters, and his mother is back to staring at the phone screen with wide eyes.
The first time they’d been to his parents’ cottage together, Shane had thought Ilya had genuinely lost his mind. Coming out had been nerve wracking and an impossible task in the moment, but now when he looks back on it, he’s strangely thankful. He doesn’t know if he’d have told his parents otherwise. In some alternate dimension, there is a Shane still calling him Rozanov and pretending to hate him after they’d made it official. The thought is so fucking depressing that he doesn’t let himself dwell on that too much. Ilya is here, getting along with his family, shoulder to shoulder with his mother as they conspire, thick as thieves.
Later, when they’re tucked into bed in the guest room, Ilya leans over to whisper something filthy about what he wants to do to Shane in the back of the boat once it’s all fixed. He open mouth kisses Shane’s Adam’s apple, and then presses a very shy kiss to his lips, and then his head comes down on Shane’s chest and he’s out like a light. He’s so himself, so light and darling and dear. My life is your life, Shane thinks. I want everything I have to be yours too.
The next morning, Shane comes back from the hardware store, which luckily had not been sold out of slotted head screws, to see Ilya sat in between his parents on the couch, carding through what looked like old school notebooks and binders.
“What are you looking at?” he asks, sitting next to Ilya, who is staring down at the page very fondly.
“Is you,” Ilya traces one of the lines in the folder with a very delicate nail.
Shane looks over and sees his spikey, seven year old handwriting. I like to run the Terry Fox run because It is good to run and to honur Canada. Terry Fox is a hero. We should all run like Terry to beat cancer. To honur heros.
There is a very bad attempt at drawing a maple leaf, and who he presumes is meant to be Terry Fox in the middle of it.
“I am studying Canadian children,” Ilya explains. “So when camp starts next week I am able to understand and connect with their culture.”
“This one is very cute,” his mother hands Ilya a filled out worksheet.
My name is: SHANE
I am in grade: TWO (2)
My favourite subject is: Gym and Art
Three Things I Like: WOLFS hockey skating
“You like wolfs,” Ilya is smiling so wide, practically beaming at the page.
“I went through a phase where I wanted to move to the Northwest Territories,” Shane tries to explain himself, like it’s abnormal for a kid to be into wolves and normal for a kid to be obsessed with the Northwest Territories. “There are a lot of wolves there.”
His mother flips open a photo album, shows Ilya a picture of Shane in snowpants and a big red jacket that swallows him up. He’s six or seven in it, and he’s holding a hockey stick, smiling awkwardly the way kids do when someone tells them to smile for a photo.
“This is him at the pioneer village,” his mom flips the page and it’s Shane, a little older now but not by very much.
He’s in a blue button up, done to the very top, and brown trousers. He has suspenders and a straw hat on. There’s two other little boys in similar getups, and a little girl in a yellow frilled dress with her hair in plaits.
“What is pioneer village?” Ilya asks.
“It’s this field trip everyone in Ontario takes in grade three where you dress up like the settlers from the eighteen hundreds, and then you do a day of candle making and butter churning on the farm, and then you do school for half the day in an old school building, but we write with quills and stuff,” Shane explains to Ilya’s bewildered expression.
“They built a place just for this?” he asks.
“It’s fun, you get to play pretend. We ate a lot of butter that day,” Shane recalls his friend having almost two fistfulls of it, and then missing school for the rest of the week.
“You look like a little farmer,” Ilya presses his lips to his index finger, and then touches little Shane’s face.
Shane feels some kind of strange emotion swell in his belly.
“Do you have any pictures of you as a kid, Ilya?” his mom asks quietly as Ilya flips through more pictures of Shane at hockey, Shane tobogganing, Shane with a pink ice cream cone and crooked baby teeth.
“I have a couple on my phone,” Ilya digs into his pocket. “Not very many. My mom would take them sometimes, but my dad did not like having clutter, and my step-mother does not like thinking about my mom, so I do not know if they still have them.”
Ilya does not like answering these kinds of questions, not because of what they reveal, but because there was no correct way for people to respond to them. Shane puts an arm around Ilya’s shoulder, and Ilya smiles at him sincerely, genuinely.
“I do not mind,” he admits, typing something into his phone. “I am sure I could get if I asked Svetlana or someone to look for them. But I had never thought to look for them.”
He holds his phone out for them to look at. It’s a picture of Ilya’s father, brother, and him. His father is standing stoically, and his arm is on the back of who looks to be Ilya’s older brother. Ilya is the only one with curly blond hair. He radiates something sweet and soft and mischievous. Shane wants to reach into the photograph and grab him, to coddle and spoil and keep safe.
Another photo, just Ilya this time, in a ridiculously large black coat, sleeves swallowing his outstretched arms. His cheeks are dimpled and his mouth is wide open, laughing.
“Was my dad’s first police jacket,” Ilya tells them. “My mom thought it was so funny to have me wear it.”
He swipes again, and Ilya is a little older in this one, next to a girl around the same age who has her arm around his shoulder and is half a head taller than him. He’s wearing a white tunic with a red sash tied tight around his waist, and his fist holds the bunched up matching red fabric of the girl’s long skirt.
“Me and Svetlana,” he says. “Is her favourite photo because she is taller than me in it. She was not taller for very long, so I don’t know why she is still bragging today.”
The patterned trim around the sleeves of his tunic match the frills of her skirt. Shane cannot tear his eyes away. Shane’s mother holds up the photo of kid Shane dressed in his pioneer clothes next to little traditionally-garbed Ilya.
“Aw,” Shane says, unable to articulate any of the other thousand things he is thinking.
We didn’t know each other here. Would we have played together if we’d known each other?
He thinks of Ilya draped over him by the fire the summer they’d gotten together, shoulders trembling as he spoke about his father, about his childhood, about being a bad kid and needing discipline. Shane cannot even conceptualize the urge to be cruel to the boy in the jacket, so much smaller than the man it belonged to.
How could anyone do anything bad to you?
Little Ilya’s eyes sparkle through the pixels, sharing something secret with Shane through time and distance and electricity.
He places his hand on the back of Ilya’s neck and massages the skin the way Ilya always does for him, feeling the little kid in him through the thrumming of his pulse.
I will take care of you now, he thinks. I will take care of you here.
Later, when they’re back at the cottage, they let the local radio station play while they assemble the sponsor welcome bags for camp. Ilya is tearing through the chocolate bar variety packs they’d bought from Costco, handfuls in every single one. For a second, Shane has a vision of him slipping a Coffee Crisp into the hands of their daughter, and a KitKat into his own mouth, holding a finger to his lips as he whispers make sure you still eat all of your broccoli for dinner so dad doesn’t find out.
“Do you want kids?” he asks, voice breaking in the middle of the sentence, betraying him.
Ilya is biting into a KitKat incorrectly, looks over at Shane. “Hm?”
He remembers Florida, watching Ilya play with the kids in the pool, pretending to be stern and angry, splashing them with his big arms as they laughed. The gaggle of them trying to grab onto his arms as Ilya waddled towards the vending machine with Shane’s credit card in between his index and middle finger gleefully, water still trickling down his knees. Chanted We beat you! We beat you! following him every step of the way.
Sometimes he really doesn’t understand the angle the media takes with Ilya at all. As sharp and jagged as he is on the ice, almost everyone that meets him off it has something nice to say. Bewildered tweets about seeing him help old women load multipacks of plastic water bottles into their car at the grocery store. Standing in between aggressive men trying to provoke women in line at bars. He’d assumed, maybe foolishly, that Ilya’s reputation would have thawed on its own as people put the pieces together and concluded that what he’s willing to do on the ice isn’t a representation of how he goes about his day to day life. The whole world, surely, cannot be so stupid.
“You’d be a good dad,” Shane says softly, reaching out to place a hand on his shoulder, sitting down next to him.
“Maybe, with you,” Ilya says, expression soft. “After hockey is done. I get Ottawa to win a cup, and then, I don’t know. Would have to be when we were both done hockey, yes?”
“I guess,” Shane hasn’t given much thought to the logistics of it.
“We would have to be married, and press would find out,” Ilya says. “So we would have to be out.” He smiles, softer as he touches Shane’s cheek. “Would be nice. Your dad told me your mom wants to be a grandparent very badly. Very genetically strong hockey baby.”
“She needs to relax,” Shane mutters.
Ilya pushes him onto his back, grinning down at him. “Do not talk about her like that.”
“I don’t like that you two are always ganging up on me,” Shane argues, but he’s silenced by a messy kiss right below his earlobe, before there are teeth in his neck.
“I can’t get pregnant, asshole,” Shane laughs as Ilya breathes down his neck and brushes his lashes across his cheek. “It would be a very genetically strong hockey baby, though.”
Ilya comes up and frowns at him. “I do not need to get you pregnant for genetically strong hockey baby.”
“Well, are you going to carry it?”
“My baby would be the most genetically strong hockey baby,” Ilya’s tongue is in his cheek, mischievous, and if Shane can see the little boy in him, obscured by the long hard years. “Yours would be second most genetically strong hockey baby, maybe.”
“Don’t talk about us having kids with other people,” Shane shoves Ilya in the chest and Ilya rolls off the couch, pulling Shane along with him.
“I am sorry,” Ilya digs his nose into Shane’s collarbone, clearly unsorry. “You are so easy to bother. I cannot help myself.”
Shane tries to sit himself up, but he ends up knocking over the variety pack of Nestle chocolates right onto himself.
“Clumsy,” Ilya says. “This is why I have best hockey genetics.”
Shane is thinking about the best way to pretend he’s angry when Ilya’s expression softens as he looks down on him, kisses him softly, sweetly.
“My favourite chocolate,” Ilya says as he swipes his thumb over Shane’s bottom lip.
Shane goes red, even though he thinks it’s a stupid thing to say. Everything sounds romantic and dirty when it comes out of Ilya’s mouth in that tone.
When they’re brushing their teeth together, Shane runs a hand down Ilya’s back as he spits into the sink, feeling the little spasming of the muscle there. “Are you nervous for the first day of camp?”
“A little,” Ilya says as he wipes the corner of his mouth, looking in the mirror. “More scared of parents than the kids. Kids will all want to be there. Parents will be mad when they find out how much chocolate we are giving them.”
“You need to control yourself,” Shane laughs.
“Children are soft spot for me. I cannot say no,” Ilya shrugs. “Is my problem. If they ask, I want them to have it.”
Shane has learned that Ilya thinks he can correct his own past by doing what he would want for himself to other people. Before he can stop it, he’s seeing a little Ilya in a kitchen, tired from a long day of practice, reaching for a cookie and having his hand slapped away. His heart hurts.
On the bed, Shane is thinking about how Ilya would never do the things that were done to him as a kid. Ilya had said Shane is the first and only person he’s ever been in love with, and a couple days later, asked Shane to please be patient with him if there were things he got wrong. Sometimes it seemed like Ilya wasn’t sure if he understood the concept of belonging, like unconditional love was something you had to be born into to be able to give and receive.
“You will have to say no, Shane Hollander,” Ilya says into the darkness. “You will have to be bad guy.”
Ilya has made his peace with what has lacked in his childhood, but Shane is realizing that he very much has not. When he looks back on what had been denied to him, he can make sense of where it came from. He knows that his parents acted with the best of intentions. Ilya’s father is dead, and his intentions lie with him, but the cruelty still rules over Ilya, like the echo of the feeling of hunger has never left him.
Sweet Ilya, so opposite of cruel in his intentions, afraid of the loon calls, wet eyed when he sees that Shane’s parents have bought a pair of water shoes in his size to keep at their cottage. The world is content to paint him as this cold, unfeeling thing.
How did something like this happen?
“Well, I have a problem too,” Shane tells him.
Ilya turns to face him. “Oh?”
“I also have a soft spot,” Shane tells him. “If he tells me he wants to do something, I can’t say no.”
There are gears turning in Ilya’s head, expression solemn, emotional. Shane wishes he knew what Ilya was thinking, but he doesn’t want to force anything out of him. He’ll wait.
“Good?” he asks, stroking his cheek with his thumb.
“Oh yes,” Ilya comes back to him, brilliant white teeth smiling. “He is very lucky.”
“Our kid is going to be so spoiled,” Shane groans. “Maybe we’ll learn how to be stricter during camp. It’s long hours and kids need structure.”
They lay there in silence.
“I wish I knew you when you were a kid,” Shane admits. “Those pictures of you make me want to cry.”
“Shane,” Ilya sounds amused.
“I can’t believe anything bad could ever happen to you,” his voice cracks. “I love you. I need to wrap you in bubble wrap, or something— stop laughing!”
“I am not laughing at you,” Ilya promises, still laughing. “Is just very cute.”
“I want to steal you from the picture and just raise you with you,” Shane’s throat still feels tight, but he’s laughing.
Ilya is looking at him softly again, and Shane sees the future this time, crows feet and smoker’s lines, this for the rest of his life.
“When I think about our kid, I always see them with your same freckles,” Ilya tells him. “My sweetheart.”
Shane almost feels like he is capable of doing it, reaching back in time, rearranging everything so that he and Ilya meet as children and are dating in high school, in a perfect world where no one cares. They’re both in Metro hoodies and they share a hotel room in Montreal during an overnight field trip. Shane gets to have Ilya for as long as possible, gets to selfishly hoard every first.
“Maybe we can get Crowell to invest in a machine that lets two men have kids,” Ilya suggests. “And we promise our firstborn will be a boy who will play hockey. He will have to accept this.”
“You’re signing away the rights to our genetically superior kid to Crowell?”
Ilya sighs. “You are right. We should propose this to someone less evil. Like Baba Yaga.”
Shane snorts, and there’s a hand wrapped around him, pulling him close.
“I would love kids with you,” Ilya says quietly into the skin of his back. “We will figure it out.”
Neither of them sleep very well that night, too nervous, but Shane is at peace, knowing Ilya is close, knowing that more of the world will get to see him softened and playful. This cold, evil world, that had bound him by duty for so long, knowing that he’d follow through, knowing he would not leave anything he’s ever known to rot and die alone even if it would kill him.
Maybe the world does not deserve Ilya. But Ilya deserves the world.
The next day starts early and is ruthless from the moment parents start arriving. Ilya is great at dealing with everyone else while Shane deals with the sign in. When the last kid arrives and runs over to join the group, Shane sighs, wipes off his forehead with his wrist before looking up apologetically at the mother who is watching him with a smile on his face.
“I think I was less nervous for my first face off,” Shane offers in an attempt to make conversation, and then he wonders if he should admit that to someone who is handing their kid to him for eight hours. “Thank you for waiting.”
Luckily, the woman laughs. “I think you’ll be fine. I was surprised when you announced this, and that you were doing this with him—” she motions to Ilya, who is standing with the youngest group of children, and fastening his helmet backwards while they all yell at him excitedly thrilled to tell him he’s wrong, “but he’s such a natural with them.”
“The tough guy thing is a total act,” Shane tries to act nonchalant but he’s beaming at the sight of it, beaming at the idea of everyone seeing what he sees when he looks at Ilya.
“I was surprised when he transferred to Ottawa, too. Maybe I’ll get to be surprised again, and we’ll get to see the cup,” she laughs.
“If they don’t kill him first,” Shane notes, as Ilya pretends to bump into an imaginary pole and fall over, and there’s three kids immediately trying to crawl onto him.
“Do you want kids, Mr. Hollander?” she asks as she tucks her license back into her wallet, and slips the wallet into her purse.
A little girl who sorts through the nails in the toolbox with him, taking a bite of a french fry that Ilya is holding out for her, standing in between them with baby deer legs as she steps onto the ice for the first time, tightly gripping both of their hands.
“Yeah, someday, probably,” he tries to sound nonchalant again, but his face feels hot with want.
Someday, Shane tries to reach into the future and feel for where it is so he can pull that thread in the fabric of time closer, closer.