Chapter Text
When he got the package, the first thing Ilya did was shove it in the back of his closet behind the box of childhood photographs Sveta had sent him. The packing tape locking in its contents remained unbroken; he knew what was inside from its tracking number, so he didn’t need to open it. In fact, he didn’t need any of it. Not the box, not the tape, and not the bottle inside, in its cute little box with the pastel bees printed on it.
Whether or not he wanted it… well, that was beside the point.
Shane didn’t know Ilya had ordered it, which Ilya tried not to make a big deal of in his mind. Maybe the bottle was like lingerie a woman gets to surprise her horny boyfriend, he thought, and then felt profoundly embarrassed by the comparison. Was he so delusional to think Shane would get anything out of feeding him with a baby bottle? Letting Ilya call him “Mama” and pretending he was little were one thing, but this was undeniably different. This was physical. This added a visual component, one Ilya couldn’t bear the thought of Shane being disgusted by.
So he didn’t open the box, and he didn’t tell Shane, and he deleted the email he received asking him to leave a review on his purchase. That was it. And yet, even though the bottle weighed only four ounces, as Shane settled into his bed one night, less than 20 feet from his closet door, the secret felt terribly heavy.
Ilya was fine when he wasn’t thinking about it. The hockey season started and he had games to fill his time with. Traveling was fun, albeit exhausting, and after playing for Ottawa for a while, he was able to enjoy more frequent victories. That meant partying and drinking and brushing off his teammates when they asked why he wasn’t flirting with any hot girls, and sneaking away to his hotel room early to call Shane before bed. Then he took up hobbies—which were very important, according to his therapist—like reading books from the shitty airport bookstores, doing photography (his teammates were surprisingly receptive to modeling for him), playing card games. He kept busy. He didn’t think about it.
But a month had passed since he saw Shane in person and he felt, pathetically, like he needed to feel little. That, he thought with a frown, was not good at all. Being Shane’s baby had never been a need before. It was something spontaneous that hinged on his emotional state, or a fun way to relax after a long day. It wasn’t a necessity that could make Shane feel a sense of obligation or pressure, but a non-essential activity that happened when it happened and could easily never happen again. (God, the possibility made Ilya’s stomach lurch).
But now, after a win against Florida that earned him painful bruises all down his ribs, Ilya was tired and sore and couldn’t stand existing as an adult for a second longer. He had to, of course, as he was dragged into a crowded club and fed two disgustingly sweet watermelon-flavored shots, but it hurt. Being himself hurt.
His vision felt a little blurry, and not just because of the alcohol. Usually, he could tell his face to make the right expressions, or tell his body to relax, or remember how to properly structure sentences in English, but then again, usually, he didn’t need to feel little. Now, he found that things he didn’t even consider to be skills were bordering on impossible, and that made his skin feel itchy and tight, vacuum sealed over his body. His pulse rattled. This was not how his night was supposed to go.
Then someone brought out a tray of shots, and Ilya’s blood froze in his veins. Instead of normal shot glasses, these were being served in tiny baby bottles adorned with blue and pink bows. “Who wants a gender reveal shot?” someone yelled. The boys all laughed as they reached for them. Ilya was shocked he could even conjure a weak chuckle. His heart jumped to his throat. All he could think about was the package in his closet and the cackling of his teammates, hilarity ensuing at the mere idea of being seen drinking from a bottle.
He didn’t feel conscious as he shouted an excuse and left, barely registering the words he was speaking at all. I’m not feeling well tonight, boys, he could have said, or maybe, I have a call to take. All that mattered was that he was shoveling over too much cash to the cab driver and walking on shaky legs to his hotel room and lying down on the crisp hotel sheets, the world spinning around him.
I want Mama, he thought, and for the first time, he meant Shane.
As he called him—Jane—Ilya didn’t have a plan. His hands were stiff and his body felt all slow and heavy and he was so painfully aware that this wasn’t something he was supposed to do. Had he ever felt this small without Shane there? He couldn’t remember. Everything was too big and too scary.
Shane picked up on the third ring. Before he could even speak, Ilya’s heart clenched with guilt and embarrassment and he choked out a sad, squeaky “hi.” There was rustling on the other end, and Ilya realized with a wince that it was 11:30 PM. Shane had likely put his book down an hour ago, donned his sleep mask, and fell asleep, and Ilya was waking him up for this. So he could be a needy child to his boyfriend.
“Hey.” Sure enough, his voice crackled with sleep. Ilya knew Shane had been focused on achieving as much REM sleep as possible. He’d talked with Yuna once about the importance of getting a good night’s rest and not waking up partway through a sleep cycle. His before-bed routine had grown more important to him and surely sleep was a crucial part of it, one that shouldn’t be interrupted. “What’s going on?”
Ilya chewed at his lip. The air conditioner had been left on and he couldn’t stop shivering, and the shivering put him right back into his body, and his body was so sore his eyes stung. He didn’t know how to answer—nothing worthy of waking Shane up was going on—but with every second that passed, any variation of “I’m fine” would get less and less believable. So he said, “I don’t know,” and tried to keep his voice from shaking.
“Is everything okay?”
“I think… I think everything is okay.”
Suddenly, he felt so small his brain whited out like he’d inhaled chemical fumes, and the feeling was so intense and so all-encompassing he couldn’t breathe. A tear fell down his cheek, instantly cold, and his mouth opened and closed and opened again as he tried to find his voice. When Shane said, “What’s going on then?” his heart hurt something fierce. He was hyperaware of the distance between them, and the chill of the AC only made it worse, made him obsess over the skin-on-skin warmth he wasn’t getting, that which he craved so desperately.
“I want…” His voice caught in his throat. He pouted tearfully and hid his face in a pudgy hotel pillow. Against the white cotton, he managed to say, with a lump in his throat, “I want to be little.”
For a second, silence. Then, Shane’s voice swirled through his ear and into his brain like a ribbon of magic. “Ahh,” he said, and Ilya could hear his smile even over the phone. “I knew there was something.”
“Don’t tease,” Ilya said, but he didn’t mean it. Teasing felt good when Shane did it, when his tone lilted in that half-loving-half-patronizing way that made Ilya want to hide his face behind his hands like a child. He yanked the ends of the blankets out from under the pristinely-made bed and curled up underneath them, making himself as small as he felt.
“I think you’re already little, aren’t you.”
“Shut up.” For some reason, the acknowledgement made his face burn. There was no malice in it, no annoyance or exasperation. Just adoration, so clear even from hundreds of miles away. And he was right, Ilya realized. He was already little, more so than he’d felt in ages. After a minute of quiet giggles blossoming through his phone speaker, Ilya whispered, “I want you here, Mama.”
“I wish I were there too.” Shane sounded sweeter now—his Mama voice, Ilya thought, something that felt like warm arms wrapping around his whole body. “I miss holding my baby. It’s not as nice over the phone.”
“Talk to me like I’m there.”
Something curled in Ilya’s chest, an intrusion, achy and solemn. He remembered Shane comforting him after sex, his hushed confession: I imagined putting you to sleep with a bottle. Then, it was silly. And it was silly, wasn’t it, feeding an adult like a baby, but he hadn’t said it with any disgust. Only bashfulness, the kind that often made his cheeks go rosy. Now, Ilya wondered if Shane felt ashamed to think about the bottle just as Ilya felt ashamed to want it. Maybe they were both scared of the same imaginary monster. Maybe.
But he couldn’t bring it up first. Even as his skin itched with the magnetic pull of yearning and tears welled up in his eyes, he could only listen to Shane’s loving words and wait, pathetically, for him to make the first move.
Back in Ottawa, the night before driving to Shane’s for a two-day meet-up, Ilya took the package out of the closet. He would never admit to the way his hands trembled as he cut the tape, thumbs wedging under the cardboard and ripping it open. Then, another box, the one with the bees on it that he remembered from the website, so cute and babyish it looked comical in Ilya’s large, callused hands. The plastic of the bottle peeked through a window in the front. As he picked at the circle of tape sealing it shut, his heart skipped frenetically. Now that he’d started opening it, he wasn’t able to stop, to hide it back in the closet and pretend it didn’t exist. He was a car crashing in slow motion, the world turning on its side at the moment of impact.
The tape lifted. He opened the flap at the top and turned the box on its head. Out the bottle fell.
Everything felt numb then, as he held the bottle like a grenade in his hands, fingers stiff, as if grasping it with more pressure would make it solidify into something real and dangerous. It was smaller than he expected. The plastic was almost clear, but with a slight opacity to it, and there were pale purple lines running up the sides to indicate its volume. He thought about how quickly he would finish its contents if it were filled and recoiled with a grimace. Would he even have time to savor being fed, or would he devour everything instantly with his adult appetite? Would Shane have to leave him on the bed while he got up and refilled it? Ilya was too large and too heavy to be carried on a hip.
He stared at it unmovingly, even as the chill of dread sank into his skin like a contact poison. He wanted it terribly, and his shame only made that want more obsessive. It was caustic the way it ate away at his resolve. He thought of smoking a cigarette, but suddenly wondered if it would just be a replacement for sucking something else.
“Fuck,” he said quietly.
Before he could talk himself down, he was walking to the kitchen, rinsing the bottle’s nipple off under the faucet, and filling it with tap water. Then he sat in his bedroom, in front of his full length mirror, and forced himself to meet his own eyes. It felt like punishment when he brought the nipple to his mouth and sucked out a mouthful of water. See how stupid you look. Do you really want Shane to see you like this? He hated that a part of him did. He hated that it felt kind of soothing, even as he looked so utterly ridiculous.
When he squeezed his eyes shut, drinking felt unremarkable. There was no embarrassing visual to muffle the sensations, only what was essentially a cold rubber straw in his mouth with plain water coming out. It was only when he looked at himself, he found, that he felt ashamed.
What if he caught a glimpse of his reflection in Shane’s eyes as he drank? What if he saw his own self judgement reflected back on Shane’s earnest face?
Even as he put the bottle back in his closet, Ilya knew he would keep thinking about it until Shane either fed him or rejected him entirely. The bottle was here to stay, and five minutes before he headed to Montreal, it found its way into his suitcase.
Lying in bed with Shane on the glorious wet spot of sweat and other fluids they’d created together, Ilya’s brain buzzed pleasantly. In two hours, he’d have to drive back to Ottawa, but for now, he got to hold his boyfriend and absorb the warmth of his skin. He grabbed Shane’s folded t-shirt and shook it out, mopped up Shane’s sweat with it, across his chest and underneath his arms. When Shane laughed and said, “What are you doing?” he just replied, “I’m taking this with me, as a souvenir from our time together.”
“That’s disgusting, Ilya.”
“Is it? Is it disgusting to steal boyfriend’s sweaty shirt and smell it every night before bed?”
“Yes. That’s exactly what it is.”
“You are so mean.”
Shane grinned exasperatedly and got up, beautiful and naked and still trembling as he walked to the bathroom. Dutifully, Ilya began stripping the bed and redressed it with the identical sheets Shane kept neatly folded in his closet. When he returned to the closet to get himself clothes, though, he found something new: a blanket, blue and greying with age. It was small, clearly, much smaller than the other king-sized blankets Shane liked. Ilya stroked the corner of it and smiled at the texture of the fabric, like elderly skin wrinkled with age, still so soft.
“What is this blanket?” he called, and pulled his hand away, afraid to tarnish something so old and precious. Shane came out of the bathroom, a towel wrapped around his waist, and his cheeks pinkened.
“It was mine,” he said, “when I was a baby. I mean, it’s still mine, obviously. A family friend got it when she found out my mom was having a boy.” He smiled wistfully as he picked it up, more confidence in his grasp than Ilya had, and worried the corner between his fingers. “I found it when I was at my parent’s house a few weeks ago and didn’t feel like leaving it in a box in the garage.”
Finally meeting Ilya’s eyes, he held it out for him to touch, which Ilya did, reverently, as if it were made of gold. It might as well have been. This is the blanket that swaddled Shane, he thought, and then, Shane was once small enough to be swaddled. His heart ached tremendously. He stroked the worn fabric and smiled breathlessly.
“I’ve slept with it a few times,” Shane continued. His face pinched nervously, but still, he smiled, as if trying to soften those nerves, or hide them. As he set the blanket back down on top of his closet shelf and began pulling on a shirt, he bit his lip with furrowed eyebrows. Did he think Ilya would react poorly? Make fun of him? Ilya couldn’t fathom degrading any part of Shane, much less one that was so soft and honest. “It makes me less stressed, I guess.”
“That makes sense,” Ilya said. He let Shane get dressed and then kissed him, his rosy cheeks and red bitten mouth. “It is good blanket.”
“Do you have anything like that? That make you less stressed?
Shane’s eyes sparkled with curiosity and wonder, and Ilya was stuck between marveling at the loveliness of the raw emotions on his face and shriveling at the reminder of his dark secret buried at the bottom of his suitcase. It wouldn’t even suffice as an answer, he figured, when he wasn’t sure if the bottle would soothe him in that way, but in the back of his mind, he knew there was a reason he thought of it so quickly. Yes, he did have something like that. Something small and babyish and vulnerable. And he wasn’t telling Shane about it.
“I have your sweaty shirt,” Ilya said with a smirk. Even less of an answer, but safe.
Later, though, as he was leaving, there was an invisible barrier between him and the door. He was rooted in place as if he had unfinished business. Shane wrapped him in a hug and did that thing Ilya died for every time, lifted him of his feet until he melted, and fuck, Ilya almost cried. In that moment, he felt he could be brave.
So he said, “I need the bathroom,” and hid by the toilet and by Shane’s fancy skincare products he’d been getting into, and he took the bottle out of his suitcase. It felt bigger, somehow, than he remembered, or maybe his hand felt smaller. He hid it at his side as he walked out and then, before Shane could see, he set it on the kitchen counter. To be discovered later, inevitably. And then he left.