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Ilya’s body was a dumping ground, a graveyard of the pockmarked scars of his childhood: muddled, dirty, broken, discarded. And–Ilya could soothe himself by thinking, could almost believe the lie–it wasn’t like the marks looked particularly bad. They traveled along Ilya’s shoulder blade, into the soft curve of his neck, and down the curvature of his spine, an army of angry welts no bigger than a dime a piece. They had faded over the years, the skin scarring over and turning from red to a whisper of mottled brown. When Ilya looked at himself in the mirror, a task that became more and more difficult as he aged into a watery version of his mother, he kept his eyes trained on his face, dutifully avoiding the places his skin had once undergone a branding ritual of sorts.
Had it hurt? Of course. When he was younger, hunched over and stretched out and hoping he would snap like worn elastic, he thought there could be no greater pain than the press, the sizzle, the tears that burned in his eyes but he refused to give his father the satisfaction of allowing to fall.
But he’d been wrong. The worst pain was facing Shane’s gaze, lips pinched and eyebrows drawn, as he stood behind Ilya, slowly ran his fingers along the raised bumps, and whispered, “Ilya, what are these?”
They were, mercifully, at home, getting ready for bed after over two weeks on the road. Shane’s toothbrush was hanging out of his mouth, and Ilya wanted to gently take it out and wipe away the smear of toothpaste at the corner of his lips, but he felt rooted in place. The whisper of Shane’s hand on his shoulder gave Ilya goosebumps, and he automatically turned away, to close himself off and signal that he was not ready for this conversation.
He isn’t sure why it took Shane so long to notice. Maybe it was the dim lighting of the hotel rooms, the urgency of one more time before one of them would inevitably get dressed and leave again. Maybe he had seen and not said anything before now, knowing Ilya’s unwillingness to rip his own heart out of his chest and lay it on the table. Maybe he wasn’t prepared for Ilya to be even more broken and fucked up than he already was.
Maybe, if he knew why, he wouldn’t want Ilya at all.
“Ilya?” Shane’s voice cracked, and Ilya felt his stomach turn sour at the idea of hurting him. Again. He shrugged Shane’s hand off his shoulder and hurried out of the bathroom, his facewash bottle still clutched in his hand. Shane, looking torn, quickly put down his toothbrush and followed him. “Ilya, will you talk to me? What are those marks on your shoulder? I’ve never looked at them too closely. I just assumed they were freckles, or moles.”
Ilya wanted to be brave, to maintain eye contact with Shane and give him the honest answer he deserved, but Ilya was a coward. “I need a cigarette.”
“Don’t avoid the question,” Shane snapped, then softened, seeming to remember that drawing Ilya out took patience, and quietly added, “Please.”
“I am not avoiding question. Just need one to take off edge.” Ilya felt like a caged animal, backed into the corner of the bedroom with nowhere to go. “Can I smoke?”
Shane gave a nod of acquiescence, though he looked unhappy about it. He trailed after Ilya to the bedside table, nose wrinkling as Ilya pulled out a pack of Marlboros and tapped one into his palm. They moved to the balcony attached to their bedroom, overlooking the canal. The wan light of the setting sun cloaked Ilya as he sat on the outdoor sectional; the impending darkness was a relief from Shane’s intense stare. He refused to look at Shane as he fiddled with the lighter, sensing the disappointment radiating off of his husband and not wanting to see it, too.
“I don’t understand why you do that to your lungs,” Shane muttered. Ilya shook his head and took a long drag from the cigarette.
“Because I am not boring.” Ilya looked away when he said it. Tears sprang to his eyes, and he rapidly blinked them away.
“Fuck off.” There was no heat to it, but Ilya heard the underlying plea for him to just talk to Shane. The open air of the balcony allowed Ilya a chance to breathe, so he took another drag, buying time, and studied Shane in his peripheral vision. Shane stood with his back ramrod straight and his arms crossed. His eyes were slightly closed, lips parted, and the corded muscles in his neck and shoulders were strained and tense. Ilya sensed the question before he asked it, closed his eyes and prepared himself to answer it. Instead of saying anything, though, Shane collapsed beside him onto the couch. Ilya felt him more than he saw him, gaze trained on the treeline where it met the water. He didn’t want Shane to see him cry–didn’t want to betray that he teetered on some capricious edge and threatened to topple over at any minute Threatened to take Shane with him, if Shane wasn’t too careful.
It terrified him, far more than his father ever had.
“Ilya.” Shane’s hands were on his face, tilting his chin toward him. “Will you answer some questions for me? You don’t have to speak, okay? Just, like… nod, or whatever is easiest. I just want to make sure you’re okay.”
Ilya nodded and tried to avert his eyes. His face was wet and burning with shame.
Shane gnawed on his lower lip, as if he were chewing on his words before saying them. “Are they… burn marks?”
Ilya nodded again, slowly. He was strong, like his mother. He could take pain.
But he wasn’t sure if he wanted to anymore.
“Was it your dad?”
Ilya closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, barely managing a small, shallow nod before the tears began to fall.
~~~~~~~
“Take off your shirt.”
It was a common enough greeting that Ilya hadn’t needed to be asked a second time. He had wondered, vaguely, what he had done this time as he undid the buttons of his shirt and slid it off his shoulders. They hissed in response; the latest welt wept with pus, and Ilya had worried briefly about the potential of an infection and whether that would keep him from hockey practice. The wound had been a punishment for losing some game that he probably could have won if he wasn’t in a constant state of anxiety around who he would see when he came home: the charming Colonel and military hero of Russia or the militant dictator of their home.
Realistically, Ilya knew that he couldn’t worry like this; it would kill him. His mother–the only person in his home who had ever cared about him–was dead by accident, a lie that had used to hurt but now rolled off Ilya’s tongue as easily as the truth, so Ilya’s angel, his saving grace, was gone. Fear of the inevitable only made it harder.
Ilya always seemed to get the brunt of their father’s anger. Andrei was bigger, older, wilder. Harder for him to control. But Ilya? Weak, soft Ilya, his mother’s son, submissive to a fault: he was an easy target, and his family seemed to revel in it.
Ilya would watch his father light the cigarette with military precision, bring it to his lips, and take a drag as he slowly folded his shirt and placed it over the arm of the sofa. The smoke would waft through the living room, and Ilya would inhale it deferentially, holding the stink of it in his lungs. He would approach his father with the calm, broken resolve of a prisoner on death row, awaiting the killing blow. Even at 14, he had understood that this was the natural order of things. He was weak, was bad, and it was his father’s responsibility to burn this inherent flaw out of him.
“You were bad today, yes?”
Ilya ignored the pinprick of tears, resisted the urge to yell, Am I ever good? Will I ever be good enough for you? Because he knew the answer.
It would always be no.
“Your teacher called.” Ah. Ilya had thought. He had skipped class, unbothered by the idea of attending a lesson on Russian history, and spent the afternoon fooling around with Sasha in the stairwell that led to the school’s gymnasium. They hadn’t been caught, thank god–Ilya was defiant, but he didn’t have a death wish–, but a small, masochistic part of Ilya almost wished they had been. To make the burn more worth it. To prove how terrible and undeserving he really was.
“This is for your own good.” It was what his father would always say as he pressed the butt of the cigarette into Ilya’s shoulders, neck, back–anywhere that clothing could cover. Anywhere that could be chalked up to an accident if anyone happened to notice and lacked the common decency to mind their own business and allow a man his own way of controlling his unruly, lying child. “To teach you discipline. You are weak, Ilya. Sloppy. Small.”
Ilya would stare straight ahead, at the portrait of his family hung on the wall, frozen in the time before his mother was gone, when they weren’t happy but had been happy enough. He would stare at his mother’s sad smile, take deep breaths in through his nose, and imagine his life in America. Or in Canada. Or in Sweden. Or really anywhere he could play hockey and drive fast cars and fuck beautiful people and never look at a fucking cigarette again.
Anywhere he could escape the burning itch that this was what he deserved.
~~~~~~~
“I could kill him,” Shane hissed, voice sharp and full of static. Ilya had finished his story through halted whispers and mixed-up English and several pauses to parse out the parts that he had forgotten–or, at least, had the good sense to not fully remember until now.
“It would not matter. He is dead.” Ilya shrugged and tried to look calmer than he felt. His stomach was in knots, and, because he was his father’s son, too, the cigarette was the only thing helping to untie them. “It is what it is.”
“But,” Shane was on his feet now, shaking with anger. Usually, Ilya would feel turned on by this, by Shane’s outrage on his behalf, but he felt washed-out. He watched Shane struggle to decide what to say next, his lips pursing and unpursing. “But he’s your dad!”
“Da, Shane. And he is gone now. Is okay.” Ilya wasn’t entirely sure that it was, but telling Shane so helped to calm the upheaval in his ribcage.
Shane continued to walk the length of the balcony, pulling at the ends of his hair. “I’m sorry. I know I’m not taking this well, and it isn’t about me. But I’m so fucking angry.”
“Will you leave me?” Ilya didn’t know what compelled him to ask it, but the question hung between them, heavy in the warm evening air.
“What?” Shane stopped mid-pace and went stock-still. “Leave you?”
Ilya palmed at his eyes. “I am… What is phrase?” He searched for the words in the parts of his mind that were always translating, always stuck between English and Russian, and found what he was looking for. “More than you bargained for.”
Shane let out a short, shaky laugh and fell back onto the couch beside Ilya. He gently tugged at Ilya’s neck until Ilya’s head was resting on his lap. He pressed a kiss into the base of Ilya’s spine, where Ilya knew one of the biggest scars–the result of his father’s grief, he had always reassured himself when he thought too hard about it, and therefore not his father’s fault–rested. Shane’s fingers began to twist into Ilya’s hair. “You are definitely more than I bargained for. I thought I’d be getting an asshole with an attitude problem, but I got a beautiful, complicated, and kind–”
Ilya squirmed at the praise and cut him off. “Shane–”
“No, let me finish. You deserve to hear this. You are more than the sum of your parts.” Ilya didn’t quite know what this meant, couldn’t quite dissect the words, but he allowed Shane to continue anyway. “Scars make us who we are, yeah. But they aren’t the only thing we are. They aren’t anything to be ashamed of. You aren’t anything to be ashamed of.”
Ilya started to protest again, but Shane cut him off with a comforting hand on his shoulder. “You aren’t weak. Do you remember what you said to me when my parents found out about us?”
“That you are drama queen, probably?” Ilya deflected, though he knew. It was what his mother would say to him, when he woke her in the middle of the night with a bad dream and snuggled against her in his parents’ bed, before he’d become convinced that each of his family’s problems were his fault and he deserved to carry the hurt for all of them.
“Shut up, you dick. You said that I was brave. For telling my parents, who I had no reason to believe would not love me and accept me for who I am, that I was gay. If I was brave for that, well…” And Shane was gazing down at him with so much love that Ilya could feel the tectonic plates in his core shift and quake and resettle. “Well, then you’re the bravest person I know. The strongest.”
You are weak.
You are small.
This is for your own good.
The words echoed in Ilya’s head, but he tried to avoid them. In a small voice, he whispered, “I do not deserve you. But I hope someday I will.”
Shane smiled down at him, a little sadly. “You don’t have to deserve me. Love isn’t a transaction; it doesn’t have to be earned. Ya tebya obozhayu. Regardless of whether or not you’re more than I bargained for.” He ran his fingers over Ilya's shoulders, and Ilya shuddered. “You're beautiful.”
“Ty nuzhen mne,” Ilya murmured. “Always.”
“I need you, too.”
Ilya closed his eyes, head still resting in Shane’s lap, and allowed his breathing to even. He knew that the scars he carried would never fully heal, but here–curled up under the stars, with his husband gently, reverently even, caressing the marks–, he realized that he could at least let go of the hurt.
If Shane believed that he was worthy, maybe he could start to believe he was, too.