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After the warmth of the coffee shop the cool late afternoon air nipped pink into Shane’s cheeks. When he’d entered Carmel’s Coffee Pantry a spring sun had been shining with the brave promise of warmer times but while he’d sipped tea and replied to emails on his phone twilight had fallen and now the day belonged to long shadows and a deepening cobalt sky. The chorus of the song that had played under the chatter of caffeine seeking customers ran in a loop through his head as he walked back to his car (“If I should fall, into the sky…”) and layered in with the lyrics circling his mind were questions about the Reebok rep’s message (was he talking about sweatbands?) and an imagined scene of what Ilya would say if he talked him into trying the matcha drink he’d had. (“This is grass! Why would you trick me into drinking food for farm animals? You are unkind, Hollander! Cow’s eat grass! Do I look like a cow? Would you like me to moo? This is funny to you? Horrible cow food drinks are a joke now?”)

Leaving coffee shops, boutiques and that toy store that always had something in it’s window Ilya would coo over behind Shane crossed a road then turned a corner, his steps heading towards the parking lot where he’d left his car, his head nodding to the beat of the song circling his mind (…do you think time would pass me by?) and his lips smiling at his vision of Ilya’s appalled expression (“Cow food, Hollander! The food of cows! Grass! Green shoots you cut with a lawnmower! Why would you want that in a drink? Why are all the drinks you like boring or disgusting?”)

He didn’t see the man following him until it was too late.

Car tires hissed on the damp road next to the car park, a delivery truck rattled by and streetlights hummed into their yellow glow. As Shane headed through the lot a creeping, hunched shadow peeled away from the sturdy outlines of the cars lined up in waiting. The figure hunted Shane, silent, watching, restless hands ready, until he paused beside his car and when he pulled his keys from his pocket the figure lunged.

“Give me your wallet! Give me your fucking wallet!”

The chatter in Shane’s mind stopped (Are they asking me to wear sweatbands? I never wear sweatbands. Do Reebok even make sweatbands? “I think next time you go to a coffee shop I must come with, someone must rescue you from your terrible choice of beverages, this grass drinking must stop, Hollander!”, …and I know I’d walk a thousand miles if I could just see you tonight). In the disorientation of being dragged from his thoughts, from the safety of his car only a handful of steps away, and the raw aggression aimed at him from every sharp line of the person gripping him, Shane reeled.

“Wh…?”  

The man in front of Shane was built with a more slender frame than him and in a fair fight Shane would probably have the advantage, but what had happened while he’d been daydreaming about rousing his husband’s playful outrage in the place he’d parked safely in a dozen times before wasn’t fair. Shane had been attacked while his back had been turned. The words snarled at him were framed by two hands clenched in white knuckled grips and the smell of stale sweat and fresh liquor. The hood of the man’s black coat was pulled low over his face so in the dark lot Shane only had the impression of hard features rough with stubble and bared teeth.

“Your fucking wallet!”

And this wasn’t even a fight, not as Shane knew them. To him fights happened on the ice, under bright lights, with two men stood toe to toe looking in each other’s eyes as they traded insults and shoves. This was dark alleys and malevolence and victims. This was loaded threats and fear and crime scenes.

“Now! Give me it now!”

He should just give the man his wallet. That’s what they say to do, isn’t it? Shane should hand over his wallet then the man would leave. There was no reason to be a hero or a tough guy, there was nothing in his wallet worth the kind of trouble someone who hides their face and attacks from behind is capable of. After the man had gone Shane could call the police. The whole thing would make a good story one day, ‘have I ever told you about the time I was mugged? I was only three feet away from my car’.

“Okay, okay just,” Shane reached into his jacket, his fingers brushed the edge of his wallet but either the mugger was too strung out to wait or thought Shane was reaching for a weapon because he surged forward, shoving Shane into the solid metal of his car. The impact should have reverberated through Shane’s body and out of his limbs with gritted teeth and a thick grunt of breath. His body had learned how to do that against the boards of a lifetime of ice rinks. But his limbs clenched, heaved, his breath stalled, choked. The blow didn’t flow through and away. It stayed, hard and biting in with a shocking pain

One of the mugger’s hands was pushing into Shane to hold him against his car, the other shoved into his jacket pocket. When he found what he was looking for the mugger stepped back, one hand clutching Shane’s wallet and the other holding something sharp and silver and stained red. When the sharp and silver and stained thing came away from Shane in the hand that had pressed against his body a wordless moan fell from his throat. The moan was like one Ilya could coax from him with his hands or his mouth but like someone had taken that sound and corrupted it until all it’s delight and pleasure had been replaced by horror and hurt.

Barely registering the retreating footsteps of his mugger Shane staggered and caught himself on his car’s wing mirror, pressing hard against his side just above his hip. One of his hands was resting against cool metal, the other warm, pulsing wetness.    

Dread seeped like glacial ice through Shane, he held his shaking right hand up and found it dripping and red. Bracing his legs to hold him up he let go of the wing mirror to pull out his phone and jab at three numbers on it’s keypad.

A voice quickly answered.

“911, what is your emergency?”

 “I think I’ve just been stabbed.”

“Man down!  Man down! Help! A vicious attack! Run, save yourselves!”

Ilya flopped dramatically onto the rug where Anya yipped and bounced over his fallen body. The game of indoor fetch had segued into a game of chasing around the living room and that had turned into a game that seemed to involve lots of noisy jumping and tripping over each other’s feet that neither Ilya nor Anya were sure of the rules for but both were enjoying very much. The dog snuffled at the back of Ilya’s neck, nosing at his curly hair and snorting in his ear.     

“That tickles,” Ilya protested, flopping onto his back, “I think tickling is cheating.”

Anya took the opportunity of having her owner’s face at ground level to smother it in doggy kisses.

“I’m not sure,” Ilya spluttered between swipes of Anya’s wet, pink tongue, “that this is any better than tickles. Your breath smells of meaty chunks.”

Anya barked, span around on the spot then took off like a furry, joyful comet for a zoomed lap around the room. Galumphing back to where she started she launched herself at Ilya, who curled into a protective ball to avoid any delicate areas having a close encounter with sharp claws.

“Ooof, be careful crazy girl.”

Ilya stretched out onto his back and scratched Anya’s flanks. She woofed playfully, straddling him them flopping down to lay belly to belly on top of him her tail wagging in the air in merry agreement that yes, her breath did smell of meaty chunks, perhaps things were getting a little crazy, and wasn’t it wonderful? Wasn’t it all wonderful?

“I am very pleased you like your food,” Ilya told her, “I am not pleased with having it breathed in my face quite as much.”

Anya plopped her chin on Ilya’s shoulder and let out a contented sigh. Ilya buried both hands into her soft fur and answered with his own sigh of contentment. He wondered what it would be like to have a tail to wag the way dogs did. What would it be like for the whole world to be able to see what thrilled you and who your heart swelled for. He and Shane would never have kept their secret from the world for as long as they had if they’d been made like that. They would never have kept their feelings secret from each other, or themselves. Maybe it was just as well that they couldn’t wag anything the way the dog sprawled on top of Ilya could, he thought, it would get in the way during hockey matches.

If they did have tails though, Ilya rubbed Anya behind a soft ear, his would be wagging all the time. He had a career he loved that paid well and gave him exciting opportunities. He lived in a comfortable home where friends and family often visited. He had a ring on his finger and the other half of its set was worn by the most perfect man in the world. Wonderful.

Anya pushed into his fingers to make them scratch just where she wanted them and Ilya indulged her for a while before turning his wrist to look at his watch. He harumphed at the time and tilted up his chin to look over at the fading light coming through the large living room windows. He could only see the top of the window from where he was lying on the rug and could just make out the pinks and purples of a sunset.

“Shane should be home soon. He said he only had a few errands.”

It was almost dark and his husband would be home soon. His husband. Those words still gave Ilya a thrill. Shane, his husband, would be home soon.

“Come on, we should put some of these toys away.” Ilya started to heave himself up and Anya climbed off his chest then watched him pick up the dog toys strewn across the floor like they were not a problem she needed to be involved with, her big brown eyes expectant.

“What?” Ilya asked her as he threw the last squeaky toy in it’s basket. “You can’t still want anything, we’ve been for a walk and played for most of the afternoon. I have dog hair all over me because of our games, look!” he picked a long grey hair off his shirt and held it up to the light.

Anya sat down on her haunches as if on command and wagged her tail, her eyes never leaving Ilya’s face.

“What do you want? There can be nothing that you want.” Ilya tried to meet Anya’s gaze with stony resistance but weakened almost immediately. “Are you hungry?”

The speed and ferocity of Anya’s tail wag increased.

“It’s too early for dinner. Shane says we should stick to the schedule.”

After looking it up online Shane insisted Anya needed a consistent feeding timetable. Anya was happy with this, mostly because Ilya would sneak her titbits whenever the opportunity presented itself.

Anya’s tongue lolled out, she grinned a doggy grin around it and the last of Ilya’s resistance crumbled.

“Okay, just a snack,” Ilya said, padding to the kitchen on bare feet with a happy puppy trailing beside him, “and don’t tell Shane.”

When Shane dropped to his knees pained lanced through them and up to explode in his skull. Gasping, defenceless, he crumpled bonelessly to land on the wound that had been ripped into his side. The pain of that was something that wasn’t even pain anymore, it was something that blasted him, breathless and senseless, to somewhere huge, blindingly bright and roaring. Shane arched inside the huge and bright and roaring struggling for scraps of breath and to find part of himself that wasn’t made of hurt.

“Sir?”

He clawed in a brittle breath, wondering if it was possible to drown in pain. Could you suffocate in the all encompassing surge of it? If he could come back to himself enough to scream would that clear it from his lungs?

“Sir, can you still hear me?”    

The tinny voice cut through the ringing in Shane’s ears, he blinked, blinked, blinked and his vision cleared enough for him to make out the damp grey of the ground he was lying on and the bold white stripe painted on to it.  

“Sir?”

Shane blink, blink, blinked again and through the bright roaring saw that just beyond the white line in front of him was a thick black shape, less substantial than the white line but larger, and past that was a second white line, just as thick and straight as the first.  Past that was another black shape, then another white line then…

White line, black shape, white line, black shape, white, black, white, black.

It was a tangible pattern Shane could hold onto, a predictable rhythm he could follow. He focused on the sequence. White, black, white, black, white, black, like the tock, tock, tock of a speeding puck against his hockey stick on the ice, white, black, white, black, white, black, like the heartbeat he heard when his head rested on Ilya’s chest.

Ilya. He’d been going home to Ilya. He’d been walking to his car, he’d been…

“Sir, are you still there?”

Shane gasped with a desperate rush of clarity, he was looking at the white lines of parking spaces and the shadows of vehicles in the lot where he’d left his car. He was on the ground. He was hurt. He was trying to get help. His phone was lying in front of him, he must have dropped it when he’d fallen. It was face up with the display lit with an active call and he stretched a hand towards it.

“Yeah, I,” he said, the words little more than breath.

Reaching through pain and weakness Shane found his phone resting in a pool of something wet, the wetness coated his fingers and when Shane pulled his phone closer they streaked it with red. The layer of Shane’s mind that had been playing the song, or perhaps the one that had been churning over what Reebok wanted from him, told him in an oddly pragmatic tone that this was bad. This was very, very bad. The pain tearing through him was bad and shivering from more than the ground’s chill seeping into him was bad and the growing pool of wetness beside him was bad. The wet was blood. So much blood. His blood. He was lying in a pool of his own blood and he was so cold and everything hurt and he couldn’t move and he could barely think and he’d been trying to get home to Ilya.  He took as deep a breath as he could.

“I’m here.” Shane dragged his phone a little closer, his cheek scraping on rough asphalt when he curled nearer to it. “I need, I need to…”

“Sir, an ambulance is on it’s way,” the dispatcher said, “it should be with you any time now.”

Help is coming, Shane told himself, help is coming. He should call Ilya. He swiped at his phone but his wet fingers just left bloody smears on it’s glass. He wanted to speak to Ilya, he’d worry when Shane didn’t get home when expected, and Shane needed to hear his husband’s voice. He tried his phone again, leaving more blurring red on the display showing the call to 911.

“Sir?”

“Come on.” Shane floundered one more time at his phone, “Please.” He needed to scroll through his contacts until he found ‘Lily’ but his coated fingers were too weak to do more than just trace lines in the red daubs already obscuring it’s screen. The white lines and the black shapes and the growing pool of red blurred as his eyes burned with tears. Shane hadn’t changed the name that had been saved into his contacts all those years ago, he and Ilya didn’t need to hide who they were to the world anymore but the nostalgia of the assumed name made Shane smile when he looked at it. Lily. That person wasn’t a secret anymore. They openly shared Shane’s bed, his life, and now rather than being a mask for shame and fear the pseudonym was a shared joke and a wink back at an impulsive, heat fuelled time. But now Shane wished he’d changed the listing in his phone to Ilya’s real name. It was such a beautiful name, so much lovelier and lyrical than his own. ‘Shane’ was a workaday drone but ‘Ilya’ had a lovely, soaring lilt, like a word used to describe eagles gliding on mountain winds, and if Shane could just see it, touch it, it would be something to hold onto. Everything was blurring and slipping and instead of gliding on the warm uplift high above a mountain range Shane was sinking into icy darkness. He curled his hand the best he could around his phone.

“Ilya.” Maybe Shane couldn’t listen to his husband’s voice but he could speak his name to hear something warm and pure and precious. A siren’s wail drew close, metal and glass and the wet ground beneath Shane reflected the blinks of strobing lights. Too weak to respond he used the last of his energy for what mattered most. “Ilya,” he said again to have the sound of what he loved more than anything in the air. “Ilya.”

When the paramedics found him he was still holding his phone.                  

The doctor was talking. So many words, talking, talking, talking, but Ilya let every word stream around him because he was holding onto the only one that mattered. Alive.

Alive. Shane was alive. He was hurt but he was alive. Shane was alive so Ilya let every other detail than that ricochet to another, way over there place where they would be picked up, examined and put in their proper positions later.

‘Alive’ was the only thing that had kept Ilya from causing vehicular mayhem and millions of dollars of property damage on the drive to the hospital. ‘Alive’ was the only thing keeping him upright in the waiting room.

Yuna was listening attentively to the doctor. She was grilling him for details, in fact. She wanted to know how Shane had been when the paramedics got to him, how long he might have been unconscious before he’d been found, how long the ride to the hospital had taken, what the initial assessment in the ER had been, what had happened during his surgery, when he was expected to wake up, what his future prognosis was. A patient doctor was answering all her questions with the words Ilya wasn’t letting in. Despite his focus on the only one that mattered (alive, alive, alive) some of the more important sounding ones did catch the edge of his attention. ‘Broad spectrum antibiotics’ were worrying words because they suggested infection, but it made sense for them to be mentioned by a doctor who’s patient had been stabbed and left bleeding on the floor, and they meant Shane was receiving drugs that could help him so Ilya cautiously resigned himself to them. ‘Positive expectations for recovery’ were better words, Ilya knew he’d be truly glad for them later when the fresh horror of hearing that Shane had been attacked had faded, but right then fear insisted Ilya’s English was good enough now that he knew ‘expectation’ wasn’t the same as ‘guarantee’.     

‘Alive’, Ilya reminded himself. Then to bed the word deep down in himself he repeated it in his mother tongue, ‘zazhivo’.            

“And are you able to tell us how soon we can see him?” Yuna asked.

‘Tiger mom’ was a term Ilya had heard used about Yuna, sometimes scathingly, and he could see the traits of a mother big cat in how she hunted out every piece of information she could about Shane from his doctor. She was always like that for Shane, prowling for what he needed, pouncing on the best opportunities for him, but she didn’t do it for glory, money or status. Her fierceness for him was how she loved him.

David stood beside her holding her hand. He was silent, but he wasn’t passive. If Yuna was a tiger, predatorily focused and formidable, David was the rocky outcrop she hunted from, steady, solid and dependable. He loved his family fiercely too, but with a quite steadfastness Ilya aspired to.             

“I see,” Yuna was saying, “so we’ll have to wait for the anaesthetic to wear off?”

It wasn’t fair to let Yuna take the burden of the words and the terrible knowing that came with them, and Ilya would take his share soon. He’d apologise for making her deal with the doctors and all their details without his help soon but not until he’d seen Shane. When he’d felt the warmth of Shane’s skin and watched his chest rise and fall and leaned in close enough to hear him breathe then maybe the vice in his chest would ease and he could stop chanting ‘alive, alive, alive’ to himself like a benediction. Then he could exist in a place of more than just urgent, yawning fear and then he would discuss medication and anaesthesiologist’s predictions but until then…alive, alive, alive.

“Ilya?” David was saying, “Ilya, the doctor said we can see Shane now.”

“Right, yes, sorry, thank you.”

The journey to Shane’s room was a walk of white walls and razor edged anticipation that Ilya pushed from his memory even as he was taking it. Shane’s room was private and as tasteful as a hospital room could be. He was rich and famous and his presence in the hospital would garner press and public attention so of course it was. There was even art on the wall, an abstract painting of misty blobs that was probably meant to be soothing.  

Shane was motionless in a bed in the middle of the nice private room, his eyes closed, an IV in his arm, and Ilya wanted to break something. He wanted to scream. He wanted to weep. He wanted to run away. He wanted to run to the bed and burrow inside Shane’s chest where he could hold him and fix him and hear his heartbeat and never, ever be parted from him.

“You can sit with him,” the doctor said, taking Ilya’s wavering pause just inside the door as uncertainty. “And you can hold his hand and talk to him if you want.”

“He will hear us?” Ilya asked.

“As the anaesthetic wears off he’ll become more aware of what’s happening around him, and I’ve had many patients tell me they knew their loved ones were with them while they were sleeping.” The doctor touched Ilya’s arm. “And it might be comforting for you too. If you have any questions please find me or a member of my staff and we’ll do what we can to help you.” He nodded, “I’ll give you some privacy,” and he left the room.

Yuna and David were stood together at one side of Shane’s bed so Ilya walked to the other. Ilya had seen Shane in a hospital bed once, before they were husbands, before they were what they both didn’t dare dream they could become, and he’d been bruised but smiling and dopily delighted to see Ilya. Now Ilya couldn’t see a mark on his husband but he was pale and still and even with the anaesthetic there was a tightness around his eyes that he thought showed where pain had been. Ilya stroked Shane’s hand and tried not to let his stomach clench at the way he didn’t stroke back. Shane’s hand was clean but there were traces of blood under his fingernails that whoever had washed it hadn’t managed to remove. Ilya squeezed those limp fingers. He would do that. He would find a cloth and warm water and wash away the blood. That was one thing he could do for his husband. Ilya would make sure his hands were clean and he was warm and he knew he wasn’t alone while he fought back from his attack.

“The doctor said that his surgeon was one of the best.” Yuna fussed with the sheets covering Shane, “He said Shane was found before he lost too much blood and the paramedics got him here in good time. He said there were no complications with his injury so hopefully his recovery should be fairly straightforward.” She was staring down at Shane, with nothing to battle via email or over a negotiating table her fierceness buckled into anguished eyes and a mouth twisted into a desolate smile. She didn’t look away from her son’s face.  “With some rest and a little physio he should be good as new, the doctor said that where he was stabbed was…” From behind her David put his hands on his wife’s shoulders. “…where he was stabbed wasn’t too,” Yuna brushed a lock of hair off Shane’s forehead, her voice cracked. “Oh, baby.”

David tucked in close behind her and rested his chin against her hair. “How about we get a breath of fresh air?” he suggested in a gentle tone so like the one Shane used at his most caring Ilya’s next heartbeat was a sharp pulse of yearning. Yuna turned in David’s arms until she met his eye, they shared a moment of the silent understanding that comes with years of partnership.  “Just for a minute,” David continued, “we’ll take a walk, look for some drinkable coffee. We’ve seen Shane and we know he’s in good hands so maybe we should just take a second to breathe?”

Yuna smiled softly. “Okay, let’s do that. Let’s breathe.” She turned to Ilya. “We’ll give you two a moment together. Do you need anything?”

“I am fine,” Ilya said. “Thank you.”

When the hospital room door closed Ilya and Shane were alone.

“So,” Ilya announced after the door clicked shut, his spine and speech stiff, “now that it is just you and me we need to talk. This will not do, this,” he flicked a staccato wave at Shane’s hospital bed, “surgeons, anaesthetic and sleeping. This is not what will be happening.” In a soft contradiction to his clipped words Ilya leaned over Shane and gently kissed his forehead. Shane smelled of clinical cleanliness and generic lemon soap and Ilya had to remind himself it was because of what had been done to heal him to hush the jealous voice insisting he should smell like their home. “This is not how we do things.”

Ilya briefly left Shane’s side to search the cupboard under the small sink tucked into the corner of the room. He found a hand towel, dampened one corner with warm water and took it to Shane’s bed.

“I love you,” he said, tenderly stroking Shane’s hand with the white towel that turned pale pink as his blood was washed away. “I am going to say that because it is important you remember it. It is important I tell you all the time. It is especially important now when you are here like this.” Ilya picked up Shane’s hand and held it against his chest. Shane slept on, right beside his husband but also very far away in a place Ilya feared he couldn’t reach. “Do you remember the first time we said I love you? After you woke me up to give a long speech about charities and how I should play for Ottawa? Of course you do. Do you remember what you said just before our I love you’s?”

The moonlight, the rumpled sheets of the bed they were sharing, Shane’s earnestness, Ilya’s eyes stung, the memory ached in his chest. Shane had wanted him and Ilya to be together so he’d sat awake in the dark concocting a ten year plan. He’d wanted Ilya so much he’d plotted out press releases and fund raising ventures in the middle of the night. Shane had wanted Ilya. Ilya had been wanted.

“You said we could change the narrative, do you remember? Make a different story about me and you? Yes? Well, we will do this again now. We are changing this narrative. The story of me and you should not have anaesthetics and blood transfusions and bleeping machines.” Ilya gestured to the white box beside Shane’s bed periodically flashing numbers. “Our story should have being awake and living good lives and happily ever after. We should have a fairy tale. So, I am making a fairy tale.”

Ilya threw the stained towel at the sink. He stroked the back of his fingers down Shane’s cheek studying the smattering of freckles and the dark fan of the eyelashes resting above them, ignoring the horrible wound that had had to be stitched together lying somewhere under the bed sheets.

“In fairy tales when the prince kisses the sleeper they wake up from the spell they are under and everything is good, yes? So now I am going to kiss you and you will wake up. That is the narrative I choose. You hear me, Hollander, after I kiss you you will wake up.  Maybe not right away, but soon, and then we will live a magical life together. Da? Da.” Ilya leaned forward and softly, deliberately, “I love you,” kissed Shane.

Shane was floating. Or maybe he was sinking. Or maybe he was doing another third thing where he was airborne but also supported and also, maybe, immersed too. Shane wasn’t even sure what part of him was floating/sinking/another thing. He was aware and he felt but he couldn’t touch and he didn’t know and it would probably have been very confusing if he could think enough to be confused.

He bobbed, or maybe he drifted, or he, maybe, flowed for a while longer without any perception of the passage of time. He was warm, probably. He felt safe, mostly. Maybe safe wasn’t the right word. Removed might be a better one. He felt removed from everything that was unsafe. He was away from everything that could - Shane hovered for a while, just hovered, weightless and tetherless in the whatever it was he was hovering in - he was away from everything. He was surrounded by nothing. It was like being at the end of the universe or in the moment before the Big Bang. It was like sleeping but being awake inside a dream.

It was nice. It was weird. It was calm.

It hadn’t been calm before. A fuzzy memory bobbing or drifting at the edge of Shane’s awareness knew that. Where he’d been before had hurt, it had been cold, and there had been a bad wetness that had scared him. He’d been desperate for something, so desperate, and not being able to get it had made his heart feel like it was breaking. Was it something he’d been desperate for, or someone?  Shane couldn’t hold onto that thought. He drifted. Or bobbed.

Shane wondered if not all of him was there in the sinky floaty place. He didn’t have any limbs to speak of and there were a lot of things he didn’t know other than the fact that he was…well, just that he was. It was like there were sparks and specks and suggestions of him wafting about in the calm and Shane figured that like a feather floating on the breeze he’d end up somewhere eventually and when he did he might be able to look around at what was going on.

A feather on the breeze. Hadn’t he been thinking about that? No, not a feather, a bird. He’d been thinking about a bird on the breeze, a bird soaring on the wind, striking and glorious, like a beautiful song, a beautiful sound.

Shane’s sparks and specks drifted some more with directionless peace and he wondered if he was supposed to be going in a direction. Didn’t he have somewhere to go? Hadn’t he wanted to get to somewhere? Hadn’t there been someone he’d wanted to reach?

He’d been following something. A pattern. Colours. White, black, white, black, white, black. They’d been laid out before him like a path, white, black, white, black, white, black, like a rhythm, a heartbeat.

There’d been another colour too. Red. He hadn’t liked that colour. It had been bad. It had been bad and frightening and it had been right in front of him. There had been so much red. Too much. It was his red but it shouldn’t have been there and it made Shane shiver to think about it.

I can shiver, Shane realised, and if felt a little like progress.

Shane hovered. He hung. He found himself back inside thoughts of the bad, frightening, too much red. There had been red, there had been white and black, but in the time before those colours there had been another one. A better one. A colour Shane had liked very, very much. There had been gold.

There had been golden hair, summer skin with a golden glow, a smile that gave Shane joy, a heart that was his home and a vital, golden soul. Shane had been gifted all of those things.  They were the best parts of his life. They were his to treasure. To care for. To have and to hold. He’d been trying to get back to them, the gold and the smile and the word like a beautiful soaring thing. He’d wanted them for so long he couldn’t remember what it was to not. He spent every day trying to be worthy of them. He needed them. The soaring bird and the beautiful name, the unruly locks of curling hair and the pirate grin, the sharp, witty tongue and the sparkling, mischievous eyes, the huge, huge heart that had been given to him in it’s entirety. Shane needed them.

He needed to get back to them. He needed to find his way back to them.

Shane floated, or sunk, or did another thing with sudden purpose.

Ilya’s life had never been a fairy story. Unless you were thinking of one of those old fashioned grim ones that Disney had sanitised into wholesomeness. Ilya certainly wasn’t a prince, and Shane would have blustered adorably if called a princess, there hadn’t been a fight with a dragon and the two of them weren’t going to waltz in a castle ballroom while tiny fairy godmothers argued over the colours of their outfits either, which was a shame because that would have been fun and Ilya would have enjoyed teasing Shane about how pretty he looked in pink. So, Shane didn’t wake, smile at Ilya and ride off into the sunset with his beloved at true love’s kiss. Ilya had kissed Shane and Shane had slept on, once upon a dreaming in his hospital bed.

Yuna and David had come back to the room with take away cups of coffee and red rimmed eyes and they’d sat together and waited. The three of them talked while they waited, about Yuna and David’s plans for a trip to Madrid, about a New Yorker article David had read, about how Ilya was training Anya to roll over. The conversations were the kind that usually accompanied coats being removed and hot drinks offered, boring, ice breaking conversations made of time filling small talk, but what better way to make a safe, familiar place for Shane to wake into? Boring was, after all, genetic. So, because new conservatory sofas were domestic and ordinary, speaking of love, of family, of home, Ilya asked Yuna about the colour swatches she’d picked and held Shane’s hand watching for signs he was coming back.

When it eventually happened it was with a careful caution that made sense for Shane. His hand twitched in Ilya’s, his fingers flexing.

“Shane?”

Ilya was on his feet. Across from him Yuna and David stood too.

Shane’s hand clenched, gripping Ilya’s, then his fingers pulled out of Ilya’s hold and scrabbled on the bed, searching.

“Honey,” Yuna squeezed his other hand, “it’s okay, we’re all here.”

“Shane?” Ilya pleaded.

And then Shane opened his eyes. There was no glitter of fairy dust or sparkle of a magic spell, just brown eyes blinking to life with the brow above them crumpled in confusion.

“Moya lyubov?” Ilya lowered himself so he was in Shane’s direct line of vision. Shane looked through and past him, eyes darting left and right in search of whatever he’d been reaching for. “Shane, you are safe now, we are all together, everything is okay.” Ilya cupped Shane’s jaw and a light smattering of stubble prickled his palm. Shane’s eyes skittered to his, wide, lost and clouded with fear. “You are safe now,” Ilya crooned, his thumb swiped soothingly over Shane’s cheekbone, “You are safe with your family.”

Shane grabbed at the hand stroking his face and his wedding ring dug into Ilya’s fingers with the ferocity of his hold. The fingers of Shane’s other hand tangled into Ilya’s soft curls.

“You are safe,” Ilya repeated, letting Shane find and cling to his words, knowing just how vital the right ones could be. “Everything is okay now.”

“Ilya?” The panic in Shane’s eyes hooked onto something deep within Ilya’s, held steady, painfully hopeful, “Ilya?”

“It is, moye serdtse. I have been waiting for you, I’ve been worried, you’ve slept for so long.” Ilya broke eye contact to kiss his husband’s forehead then rest his own against the spot he’d just caressed. “But now you are awake and everything is right again.”

Shane’s wedding ring bit harder into Ilya’s hand as Shane tightened his hold.

“You had us worried, kiddo,” Ilya heard David say. He saw Yuna’s hand squeeze Shane’s arm. He felt Shane shift as he looked towards his parents. He closed his eyes. ‘Alive’, sang the chant inside him, this time chiming with silvery star bursts of joy instead of being ground out with blunt doggedness. ‘Alive, alive, alive, alive! Awake!’

Ilya swallowed down tears, if he let them fall they would land to roll down Shane’s cheeks and he didn’t want to burden him with any more marks of pain.

Yuna inhaled with a stutter. Shane let out a deep breath. 

“Son?” David asked.  

Ilya sat up and was greeted by the sight of the most beautiful eyes he’d ever seen. His husband’s eyes were brown like the dark warmth where all growing things drew life from and they were clear like a perfect sky shining blue and watching from above. They saw him, those eyes, they knew him and they loved him. He loved them too. Too much for words. Too much to know what to say when they finally looked up at him open and without fear or pain.

“There you are,” Shane said.

The view from the hospital bed was dull. Which was just how Shane liked it.

He slept. He ate pudding and he slept some more. He woke from a nap to find Ilya eating pudding.

“This stuff is good. The texture is very…” Ilya held a spoon full of pudding up, tipped the spoon and let the brown gloop splllllllooooooooooopppppt back into it’s plastic cup in one viscous, juddering mass, “…American but it is good. We should buy some for home. Can you get it from a normal store?”

“I’ve never looked,” Shane said, “come here,” he added, clumsily waving Ilya towards him, “you’ve got pudding on you.” Ilya leaned close enough for Shane to rub at his chin with a thumb. “There,” he said when the spot of chocolate was gone.

“I clean up well, yes?”

“You do. You smell good too, your breath smells like chocolate.”

“Ah,” Ilya’s grin was a pleased flash of white teeth and playfulness, “I know now that if I want to smell good for my husband I just need to eat a cup of chocolate pudding, this will save me a lot of money on cologne. I wonder,” he said, leaning even closer, “if I taste of chocolate too.”

They shared one of the gentlest kisses Shane had ever had. It was tender and careful, with hidden hints of past and future pleasure and ‘I know, I’ll wait, I’ll always want you’ woven through every touch of lips and tongue. So much of Shane felt pained, weak and like his body was still holding, taunt throughout his limbs, the shock of being slammed back against his car that the kiss felt like every soft comfort that had ever been wrapped round his shoulders. 

When the kiss ended Shane couldn’t make himself smile at Ilya, he wanted to but fear that if he tried to show his husband how good the kiss had made him feel everything else he was feeling would show itself too. Ilya would understand. Ilya would do his best to care for him, but Shane felt too tentatively sewn together by sutures and the suppressed memories of white lines and red pools that he couldn’t risk testing any seams.

“I think you need another nap.” Ilya smiled for them both, a loving, sad and knowing quirk of his lips. “I will see you when you wake up.”

He traced over the lines he knew were ready to form between Shane’s eyebrows. Shane hadn’t realised he’d closed his eyes until he felt the finger smoothing his skin but didn’t see the movement. He let sleep pull him deeper into darkness.

“Rest,” he heard whispered. “Sleep. Dream. Dream about our cottage, the sun on the lake, the wind in the trees, the birds on the wing, our king sized bed and maybe, if I promise you the sheets won’t get too dirty, you could dream about chocolate pudding.”     

Time became strange after that. It meandered, it stopped, it jerked forward in uneven hops of hours, afternoons and shift changes. How the light came through the window and moved across Shane’s room had little bearing on him because he slept through the cycle of the sun, waking in disparate moments to find it was noon, or sunrise, or the nightshift staff had arrived.

One of those wakings was into a heavy fog of fever. That waking was a headache of sweat slicked skin, a cold, sodden hospital gown, the shiver and burn of aching joints and a throat thick with desert grit.

He licked his parched lips.

“Here, honey,” his mum’s voice said then cool, wetness dabbed on his lips. “This should help. You’ll be fine, just keep hanging in there, okay?”

Later he swam to the surface of his consciousness and heard Ilya’s voice.

“…temperature has come down a little but he is still sick,” he heard. “What happened with the broad antibiotics? Why did they not work, does he need different, are there narrow antibiotics?”

A patient voice, presumably a doctor, answered but Shane wasn’t interested in her, he forced his eyes open and looked for Ilya. He found him as a familiar silhouette against a brightness that hurt his eyes. Shane reached for him through the heat in his skin and the swimming in his head.

“Ilya,” he rasped to the sad tilt of his husband’s head. “S’okay.”

Ilya turned his back on the harangued doctor.

“Shane, shhh, shhhh,” he hushed, stroking sweat soaked hair off Shane’s forehead. “Everything is okay.”

“Hot.” It felt important Shane say this, he didn’t want Ilya to think he hadn’t immediately pulled him close because he didn’t want him in his arms, he always wanted Ilya in his arms, but the fever wracking him wouldn’t let him lift them. “Aching,” he added because Ilya needed to understand that only illness and incapacitation would stop him touching and holding him. And he did feel ill, actually, like he’d been hit by a truck, a truck that was carrying lava and spiked things, lava and spiked things that had spilled messily from their container and engulfed Shane. Why a truck would be carrying lava and spikes was unimportant because that was definitely what was covering Shane and it was the worst he remembered feeling since… Wincing, he shied away from that thought.   

“I know, I know,” Ilya said, so gently. “You don’t have to worry about anything. Rest. Come back to me when you are well again, I am here.”

As Shane fell back to sleep the conversation drifted from his memory.

Shane slept and he burned. He burned and he slept. He woke but he was burning so fiercely that when he wasn’t asleep it didn’t feel like he was awake. The thick, heavy heat made him restless but exhausted and he was only fitfully aware of cool touches to his skin and kind voices nearby.

“Reebok sent flowers, they arrived this morning. That was kind of them. I think it’s the ugliest bouquet I’ve ever seen but I suppose a company that makes sporting equipment won’t know much about blossoms.”

“You should see the way some of the cars are left in the parking lot. I only hope the worst ones aren’t driven by the surgeons. I wouldn’t want someone who can’t aim straight at a parking space poking at my insides with a scalpel.”

“The Metros have been knocked out of the playoffs. It was the best news I’ve heard for days. I was thinking about leaving a bottle of champagne in the doctor’s break room to celebrate. Except no one wants doctors who are drunk so maybe instead I will buy ginger ale.”   

Finally, slowly, the lava and the spikes began to retreat, the fire under his skin and inside his skull dampened, and Shane slipped deep into a curing slumber. 

“…I saw her pacing outside, it looked like she was having an intense phone call so I left her alone,” Ilya said.

“Ah, good choice,” David answered. “When Yuna is in the zone it’s best to stay out of the way. No good ever comes from interrupting her.”

Shane woke staring at the sun. And his husband and dad were there. No? No. He couldn’t be staring at the sun. That was impossible. He was awake but his eyes were shut and the light of whatever part of the day he was in was pressing against his closed eyelids. That made more sense. It was nice to have something make sense for a change.

“She said she was going for coffee twenty minutes ago, the call must be important.”

“There are always at least three important things spinning around in my wife’s head. When she said, ‘I’ll go for coffee’ what she meant was, ‘I’ll go for coffee, make a phone call to have the conversation I’ve been planning for the last half hour, and google the questions that just occurred to me about religious rites in ancient Mesopotamia’.”

“Ancient Mesopotamia?”

“If it’s not that it’ll be something else.”

A brief silence fell where behind his closed eyes Shane pictured the two men share a wry chuckle.

“Shane is the same,” Ilya said. “There are always many thoughts busy in his head, many things he worries about. It worries me at times, all the things he thinks he has to figure out.”

A soft pressure squeezed Shane’s arm then settled as a slight weight curved around the crook of his elbow. Being touched like that was nice, familiar, and Shane wanted to reciprocate the comfort, with a pat or a responding squeeze, but felt too heavy and indolent to move. He felt heavy but not hot, Shane realised, indolent but not weighted with aches. His fever and all it’s molten spines had passed. He couldn’t believe it had taken so long to notice the relief of not feeling like he’d been run over by a heavy goods vehicle.    

“It’s not always easy, being the grounded one, is it?” David said. “It’s not a chore, and it’s not something I want to change, but it’s not always easy.”

“It’s not always easy,” the weight of the hand on Shane’s arm stroked up and down, “but it is not something I -” a pause as Ilya searched for the right English word, “- resent. And he is the same for me, he is my,” another pause, longer, punctuated by a sigh, “Shane is my centre.”

His relief wasn’t all it had taken Shane a while to recognise. Normally when they were with him Ilya sat on the left side of Shane’s bed and his parent’s took up a place on his right. That was the pattern Shane was used to. But now the two voices he could hear were both coming from the left hand side of his bed, Ilya and his dad were sat together. Shane smiled, or felt like he had, glad they were together and that while he couldn’t take his hand Ilya had someone to be with him.

“You know,” Shane’s dad cleared his throat in the time honoured way of all stoic fathers about to say something demonstrative, “it’s going to be okay. Not just because Shane’s fever has broken. He will be fine. And you will too. Shane is getting better but if he wasn’t, if he -” David ran out of words. He rallied and tried again. “You will always be part of our family. I don’t want you to think that without Shane you’d have no one. You’ll always have us, Yuna and me.”

Ilya was such a force of nature, big and bright and bold, that in comparison Shane’s contribution to their relationship – being reasonable and dull and careful - didn’t feel like much. And it had taken a mortifying amount of time for Shane to understand the imbalance of advantages he had compared to Ilya - they lived in his country, spoke his language, were supported by his parents – Ilya had sacrificed more then he ever had for them to be together. What that made Ilya bear, what it deprived him of, Shane worried about not being able to match it.

“I, thank you,” Ilya stammered in response, “that is, thank you.”

Ilya deserved so much and Shane feared he was both not enough and too much to give it but his father had just offered him something he ought to have. Shane could never be big and bright and bold and golden for Ilya, but he could love him and draw him close to his family where he would be safe, seen and cherished.

“Anytime, son. You’re very welcome. It’s out pleasure.”

 Heavy, indolent and warm from something much kinder than fever, Shane fell back to sleep.

Shane woke. With his eyes open this time. He saw a hospital room with charts, clean sheets and fuzzy art.

“Good morning.” Rolling his head slowly to the right Shane found his father smiling down at him. “It’s good to see you awake.”

“It’s good to be awake. Is everybody okay?”

“Everybody is just fine, son. Everybody is going to be just fine.”

When Shane woke he was alone. And that was fine. He was grateful that his parents and Ilya had been spending so much time at his bedside but it was good to have a moment in his own company. They talked when they were with him, Shane’s family, sharing the stories the dogsitter had told Ilya about Anya and what had happened on his parent’s drive to the hospital, and Shane loved to hear their voices. Sometimes he joined in the conversations and sometimes he let them flow around him like a delightful, affectionate, burbling stream of white noise. The room was silent with just him in it, that was good too. He let himself breathe, let his thoughts happen, and let himself feel his body, as much as he could with all the painkillers in his system.

He’d recently seen his wound for the first time when the doctor checked on his progress. He’d expected a huge gash, brutal and raw, stretching between his hip and belly but that’s not what he saw when the dressing was peeled away. His injury wasn’t lined with thick black stitches holding ragged halves of skin together like he’d imagined and it wasn’t a long, disfiguring mark that made the body that had taken him to the top of the sport he loved and coupled him with the man he loved something that wasn’t his anymore. It was an angry slash sitting just above his hip that looked like it would pulse hotly to the touch and Shane was grateful for every milligram of pain relief he’d been given when the doctor carefully pressed the enflamed area around it. It would scar, certainly, it would haunt Shane, that felt like a certainty too, but the doctor’s satisfied hum told him it was healing. As he lay in his quiet hospital room Shane breathed and tried to settle himself into the new home of the body that was his on the other side of the mugging.

Later, Ilya walked into his room with a grinding set to his jaw and an untamed bleakness in his eyes.

“Hey,” Shane called to him.

“I’ve spoken to Jenny and she said Anya is fine. She says she misses us, do you think we could sneak her into the hospital for a visit? We could say she’s a service dog, I could buy her a little vest, I know she’d be a good girl. I think the nurses would like her.”

Ilya wouldn’t look at Shane. The wild flint in his eyes was clenching hard in his shoulders and indignantly in his fists. He didn’t come straight to Shane’s bedside like usual, instead he paced the room in jerky steps.

“Hey,” Shane held out a hand. “Come here.” Somewhere between the medication he was on and the brittle snap of Ilya’s breathing he lost any ability to ameliorate what he wanted to say. He was never good at that at the best of times. “Have the police called you?”

Ilya’s eye roll was an object lesson in Slavic distain.

The detective in charge of investigating Shane’s mugging had called while Ilya had been out of the room. He’d had news. Shane was still coming to terms with what he’d been told. It looked like Ilya was feeling the same.

“The police! Yes I have spoken to the police. They have made an arrest,” he performed ironic air quotes, “and are compiling relevant evidence but it is too early to tell us more at this time. I don’t understand why it’s taking so long to find the person who hurt you, if they have arrested someone then they must have a good reason to think he is the mugger. If he is he must go to jail for a very long time. Probably until he dies. Possibly for some time after that.”

Shane beckoned a still pacing Ilya over with his still held out hand. Ilya reluctantly came, taking Shane’s hand then pressing a kiss to his knuckles.

“Before they press charges they need to be sure they have the right person,” Shane said.

“How hard can it be for them to find the right person? You were attacked in the city, there will be cameras pointed at the streets you walked down, there will be footprints.”

“Footprints?”

“Yes, footprints!” Ilya threw up the hand that wasn’t holding Shane’s. “Like in the old detective stories! A murder happens in a house and when the detective comes he looks at all the flower beds under the windows until he finds a footprint and then he knows that the butler did it.”

“Wow, you know if the hockey thing doesn’t work out for you maybe you should join the police.”

Shane teased a smile from Ilya, he turned the hand that was holding his over so he could kiss the inside of his wrist.

“I think I would do better as a private detective,” Ilya said, “I could wear a long coat and a hat,” he mimed putting on a fedora at a rakish angle.

“You’d look good.” The picture in Shane’s head of Ilya in a trench coat and hat, stealing his way through shadowy alleyways and murky circumstances was an attractive one.

“And you could be my assistant, coming with me everywhere and writing things in a little notebook.”  

“I’m an assistant with a little notebook?”

“Don’t pretend you wouldn’t love writing lists of clues in a little notebook.”

Shane couldn’t. He did enjoy a good list. “Hollander and Rozanov Ivestigates?” he asked.

“Why would your name come first if I am the detective and you are the assistant?”

“I’d be investigating too, and it’s alphabetical.”

“Alphabetical is boring, Rozanov and Hollander is better, it’s a badass name, it sounds like people you could trust to get you out of a tricky situation, Hollander and Rozanov sounds like people you could trust to paint your house.”

“Being detectives could be fun,” Shane tried to hold his husband’s gaze, the fraught tension spiking through Ilya had calmed a little but despite his joking it hadn’t completely left him. He still looked ready to vibrate out of his skin, “we could solve crimes and make the world a better place.”

“That would be, yes, that would be good. Many parts of the world could use fixing.”

Shane braced himself on one arm and slowly folded himself forward from his sitting position to leave an inviting space in his bed between him and his pillows. He tugged on Ilya’s hand.

“Come here.”

“What are you doing?”

“Come here!” Shane insisted, “Get into bed with me, we can both fit if you get in behind me.”

“What? No! Hollander, stop moving, you will hurt yourself.”

Shane ignored Ilya’s panic and pushed himself up further. “Just be quick, come on!”

Sitting forward was proving more difficult than Shane had hoped. There was a tightness in his side that was like pain and a struggle in his muscles that was like weakness and sweat beaded on his temples and against the collar of his hospital gown. Shane was grateful Ilya was quick to kick his shoes off and tuck himself in behind him.

“Okay, okay, I am here.” Ilya wrapped his arms around Shane and gently pulled him back against his chest. “Now lie back. You’re supposed to be resting not jumping around.”

Shane lay back thankfully, trying to control his quickened breaths.

“Shane?”

“I’m okay.”

Ilya snorted something dark and Russian.

“And I wasn’t jumping around. Anyway, it was worth it.”

It turns out that two hockey players don’t fit that well in a hospital bed designed for one person. The fit was tight, and it was lucky that Ilya wasn’t interested in sharing the blankets because there was nowhere near enough, but having Ilya’s chest rising and falling against his back, Ilya’s arms around him, was the closest Shane had felt to home for days and days.

“Ilya?”

“No.”

“What?”

“You want to have a serious conversation. I don’t like serious conversations.”

“The detective said…”

“No serious conversations on this day please. Just this.” Ilya stroked up and down Shane’s arms, he pressed a kiss to the side of his head.

“Ilya.”

“Nope.”

“Ilya.”

“Nyet.”

“Ilya!”

“If the police charge the man they’ve caught he must go to jail,” came from behind Shane in a snarl of sharp teeth and jagged fury. “A terrible jail, the worst. He should be sent to a Russian gulag deep in the mountains where everything is made of stone, there are only bars in windows that let in snow and he eats stale bread and wears chains every day. I could make calls and arrange this. He should stay there forever until he forgets sunlight and rots to a miserable, empty, twisted thing.”

Ilya’s hold on Shane stayed gentle despite his savagery. He nuzzled into Shane’s hair and Shane imagined his face, eyes squeezed shut, mouth contorted and braced himself to turn and comfort his husband but was stopped by a tightened grip.

“I hate him,” Ilya savage voice cracked with heartbreak. “The man who did this to you, I hate him. It is hard inside me, so much hate, hard and loud, like steel, like screaming. It feels so big,” The emotion hampering Ilya’s English made his words clumsy and achingly truthful, “and I don’t know his name. When he is charged it will be in the news. There will be pictures and details and interviews with his neighbours. I hate him so much now when he is just an idea, I don’t know how it will be when I know his face.”

The news that Shane’s attacker might have been found meant an identity parade and possibly a trial with him sitting in a witness box, and Shane wasn’t sure what to feel about that. There would be a media circus. There would be speculation and intrusions into his private life. Shane would hate every moment of it but if it meant that the mugger would never be able to hurt anyone else then it could be bearable. To him the man who attacked him was a figure of shadows and blades and sudden horrible pain, a criminal who needed to be brought to justice. To Ilya… 

“He hurt you. He could have taken you from me. I want him to suffer, I want him to feel the pain you felt, that I felt, that your parents felt. I want that so much it is like steel and screaming too.”

Shane only knew that his heart hadn’t actually skipped then thundered a terrible beat because if it had the monitor attached to his finger would have called an alert, it was that an understanding had happened swift and devastating where the device was watching.  If the engine failure on the plane Ilya had been on that day had caused it to crash, if Ilya had died, if Shane had lost him and then learned he’d been stolen by negligence, neglect or corruption, like with profit being put before safety, it would have been the worst kind of waking nightmare that would have had Shane blazing like a self-righteous sun. He would have burned every shareholder, every mechanic, everyone who’d ever signed a contract or taken a payment. He would have spent the rest of his days finding everyone who’d had a part in taking the love of his life from him and ruining them. And if Ilya had been stabbed in a parking lot and left to die alone in a pool of his own blood Shane would have raged with the self-same flames.     

“I don’t like that I can hate this way,” Ilya’s arms tightened around Shane. “I don’t like how it is filling me up. I feel like there is,” he pressed his face into Shane’s shoulder so his next words were muffled, “there is so much angry fire in me. It makes me feel like bad person, not good husband.”

“What? Ilya!” Shane pulled Ilya’s right hand up to his lips so he could pepper it with kisses. He stroked the ring on his finger. “You are the best husband, I love you so much. I’m so sorry I didn’t see how hard this has been for you.”

“You have been hurt, you have been sick, it has not been for you to see that anything is hard for me.”

Shane felt a barb of untruth in that. His and Ilya’s marriage ceremony hadn’t included ‘in sickness and in health’ but the essence of it had been in the commitment they’d made.  Shane felt that those vows didn’t just mean one of them cared for the other when they were unwell, it meant they should care for each other while they were unwell, that the caring should always be there even during troubled times.

If it’s hard for two hockey players to fit in a single bed it’s even harder for one of those players, the one with stitches in his body, to turn around to face the other, especially when the second one is clinging to the first like he’s afraid an unexpected moment could snatch him away. Shane nudged Ilya and moved his weight, expecting Ilya to understand and make room for him to manoeuvre but Ilya didn’t respond. Shane lifted the hand he had showered with kisses so that Ilya’s arm wasn’t wrapped so tightly around him, pressed a slow, steady kiss to it’s centre, then started to turn slowly and steadily around.

“No! Is,” Ilya snatched his hand out of Shane’s, held it hovering over where under the blankets Shane’s wound was healing, “is…?”

“If you help me it will be okay.”

Countless thoughts, worries, predictions, arguments, counter arguments and emotions churned behind Shane’s husband’s eyes.

“Please, Ilya.”

And that was all it was ever going to take. Ilya would have bickered with a logical argument about how the doctor had said Shane’s wound was knitting together nicely and a little gentle movement wouldn’t hurt him, he would have taken great pleasure in doing so, but Ilya would never quarrel with Shane’s honest need.

“Okay. Let me help.”

With some holding and some lifting, some hands supporting and some taking of another’s weight the two hockey players in the bed positioned themselves so instead of being chest to back they were chest to chest, mostly. All the toing and froing had shifted them so that Shane was slightly higher on the bed than Ilya with his head tucked under his chin. He stroked his hair, watching the curls coil round his fingers.

“It will be okay,”

Ilya’s snort huffed against the hollow of Shane’s throat. “What will be okay?”

“All of it. The police, the investigation, the trial, if there is one, all of that stuff.”

“You have no way to know that.”

“I do,” Shane closed his eyes on the room with it’s abstract painting and it’s monitors and emergency call button. All he wanted from his senses was to know his husband, his beautiful golden husband, was real and in his arms. “I know everything will be okay because we’re together. We can figure everything else out, we always have. When we’re together we can do anything.”

Ilya sobbed out a laugh. “Anything?”

Ilya had always been a mass of glorious contradictions. He sobbed out laughs. His kisses were filthy and tender. He was a wonderful asshole. He was a prickly, ragebating, sensitive, teddy bear and a horny, vain, superficial, knuckleheaded, attentive, thoughtful, romantic, loving, gentle soul. He burrowed against Shane till there was no space between them like he was wearing the heart monitor and the only way to keep it beeping was to have Shane’s skin touching his but did it in a way that made Shane feel precious and held.

“He didn’t take me away,” Shane said into the top of Ilya’s head. “We’re here together. I love you and I’m with you.”

Under the arm Shane had wrapped around him Ilya’s breath hitched. “I love you too. I told you so when they brought us to your room and you were still asleep. I kissed you, to make you wake up like in a fairy tale.”

“Like you were Prince Charming?” Shane pressed his smile into his gloriously contradictory, angry, whimsical husband’s curls. “Does that make me a princess?”

“Always,” reverberated with a rumbling Russian accent into Shane’s chest.

“I think,” Shane stroked Ilya’s hair again, wasn’t sure if he had stopped, wasn’t sure who he was soothing, “I think it’s okay that you’re angry. I think that’s normal. I think if it had happened the other way around I would be angry too.”

“No,” Ilya shook his head, “not you. You would be thinking about how maybe the mugger was an addict or in trouble and how it was sad he’d had no help, you would be thinking how bad things had to be for him to do something so desperate. You would be making a donation to a charity that supports convicts after they’ve left jail. You would be thoughtful and kind.”

“Not if he hurt you,” Shane said. “If someone hurt you I’d be full of steel and screaming too.” 

They both fell silent. One thinking about the difference between love and hate, the pain of bleeding and the pain of healing and whether being glad to be the one carrying a wound to spare another was brave or selfish, and the other thinking about loving to distraction and being loved to distraction, and if it was possible to have a ceremony where you get more married after you’ve already done it once, getting extra married, because you love your spouse even more than you did when you first said ‘I do’ and the way you feel about each other is so huge, so loud and so potentially hazardous that it needs to be corralled then expressed like a controlled explosion.

“It worked,” Shane said eventually, when the way he and Ilya clung to each other softened from frantic to quiet.

“Hmm?” Ilya rumbled drowsily into Shane’s shoulder.

“You kissed me and I woke up, it worked.”

“This is true. This must mean I am a prince.”

“It must.”

“And you are a princess.”

“Maybe.”

“And that we are in a fairy tale.”

Shane hummed doubtfully.

“I agree, a fairy tale would have more comfortable beds.”

“It’s not too bad when you get used to it.”

“Then I will stay where I am and see if it gets better.”

“You should.”

“Wait to get used to it?”

“Stay.”

When the nurse came he found them both asleep.

After the cool of the car’s air conditioning the summer sun drew pink into Shane’s cheeks. He’d opened his passenger side door and climbed out. Ilya casually but really rather quickly jumped out of his own door and scurried around the front of the car to get to his husband.

“We are here,” he said simply.

Shane rested against the car’s warm metal and looked around him.

“Finally.”

The trees, the lake and the summer sky above the cottage seemed to be doing their best to be perfect. Shades of blue glimmered, shot through and glinting with white and gold, and every depth and hue of green swayed and rustled, verdant and fresh as new growth and freedom. 

Ilya reached into the car and unclipped Anya who launched herself at the cottage’s garden in a frenzy of sniffs and tail wags.

“Don’t go too far,” Shane called to her retreating back end like she was an excitable child not a well-trained dog.

He watched her disappear behind a bush then looked around him.

Ilya saw him take in the familiarity of the woodland, noticing how much the trees had grown, which had broken branches from winter storms and where there was dead wood that needed clearing. He was probably thinking about where Anya might go next, and what they should have for lunch too, and it was likely there was a song they’d heard on the radio during the drive playing in his head, as well as a plan of what he would wear if the weather turned colder tomorrow. 

“So.” Ilya put a healthy amount of swagger into the steps it took him to reach Shane.

“So?” Shane put a healthy amount of smirk into his smile.

“We made it.”

They’d been travelling since before dawn and they’d been waiting to leave for the cottage for so long before that. Shane’s release from hospital had to come first, then his meetings with his physiotherapist. The guilty plea, the relief of a trial not being needed and the avoiding of the short but intense media frenzy happened with Shane and Ilya cocooned in their city home where gentle exercise and long, lazy, lie ins in bed or stretched out on their sofa dutifully took place.   

“Of course.”

Ilya slid his hand under the creased linen of Shane’s shirt to rest against the scar above his hip. He kept finding himself doing that. Either pressing his palm against Shane’s t shirt, or, like now, slipping his hand under his clothes to rest against where he’d been hurt. Shane tolerated the touches, an understanding smile curving the lines near his eyes. Ilya didn’t know what he was searching for when he reached out like that but he found it somewhere in warm skin and a raised line of scar tissue. Shane was healed, whole and with him close enough for Ilya to reach out and touch. Shane was alive, alive, alive.

He put his hand over Ilya’s. “It took some time but we got here.”

“Yes, the traffic was very bad getting out of the city,” Ilya replied knowing that wasn’t what Shane was talking about at all, “but the tricky bits are what makes the drive worth it.”

From somewhere close by Anya barked. The angry flapping of a disturbed bird’s wings followed.

“Those wolf birds are a menace,” Ilya said.

“That bird was probably minding it’s own business before Anya bothered it, and how do you even know it was a loon?”

“It is always a loon.”

There couldn’t be a story of the time Ilya and Shane’s had spent at the cottage that didn’t feature a loon. The story of their lives, their love, was irreverent and solemn, about patience and urgency. Their narrative featured hotel rooms and ice rinks, long silences and honest talks, hospital rooms and cottages, stray dogs and wild birds, and the two of them learning just what loving each other as much as they did meant.

“We should go inside,” Shane said, “and open all the windows, the place will be ready for some fresh air.”

“Okay.” Ilya let his hand drop from under Shane’s shirt and walked to the rear of the car to open the boot.

“Is there a chance you’re going to let me carry any of the bags?” Shane asked.

“None at all. But this is fine. I get to look after you like an attentive husband and you get to watch me carry heavy things in a strong, sexy way. Everybody wins.”

“Lucky me.”

Ilya hefted a suitcase from the back of the car and grinned at Shane like he was posing, shirtless and oiled up, as Mr July in a ‘Sexiest Canadian Woodsman’ calendar.

“See?” he called, “everyone is happy.”

Shane laughed. “Yes,” he said. “Yes we are.”