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The restaurant had been Ilya's idea.
This was a fact Shane was going to be holding onto for a very, very long time.
It was mid-July, deep into the off-season, the kind of blissful stretch of weeks where neither of them had anywhere to be and nothing pressing to do beyond charity foundation emails and the occasional media obligation. They'd been lazy with it - sleeping in, going on long bike rides along the river, cooking simple things at home, eating too much takeout. Shane had been aggressively not thinking about the coming season, which his therapist had told him was healthy and his body had apparently agreed with, because he'd been sleeping better than he had in years.
Ottawa in the summer was genuinely beautiful, something Shane had not expected when Ilya had first signed with the Senators four years ago. The waterfront was good. The trails were good. There were farmers markets and a decent coffee scene and a neighborhood that had become theirs in a way that felt real and settled and permanent.
So when Ilya had suggested trying the new seafood place on the water - the one that had gotten a glowing writeup in Ottawa Magazine and had a three-week waitlist - Shane had been enthusiastic.
"Crab tower," Ilya had said reverently, when the dish arrived. An architectural absurdity of dungeness crab, avocado, mango, and something the menu had described as "coastal remoulade." It was enormous. It cost an amount of money that would have horrified Shane's twenty-two-year-old self.
"This is very extra," Shane said.
"Yes," Ilya agreed, already pulling it apart with zero patience. "This is why I ordered it."
They ate the crab tower. They ate most of a shared bass entrée. They drank a very nice white wine and watched the sun go low over the water and Shane had thought, sincerely, contentedly, this is a good night. He'd even thought about how he might tell his mom about the restaurant, because Yuna Hollander had strong opinions about seafood and even stronger opinions about Ottawa's dining scene.
He did not, as it turned out, tell his mother about the restaurant that night. He did not tell anyone about the restaurant. He never wanted to think about the restaurant again.
The first sign was subtle enough that Shane almost missed it.
They got home around nine-thirty. The evening was warm and they'd walked back along the river path, and Shane had been pleasantly full in that comfortable, slightly indulgent way that came from a genuinely good meal. They'd talked about nothing in particular - whether they wanted to get a dog, some ongoing renovation situation involving Hayden's new house. Shane was not ready to get a dog. Ilya brought this up approximately once a month and Shane said no approximately once a month and this was apparently a sustainable dynamic.
Inside, Ilya flipped on the kitchen light and went to get water from the fridge and Shane sat down on the couch and noticed, in a peripheral, easy-to-dismiss sort of way, that his stomach felt... not quite right. Not bad, exactly. Not pain. Just a low, uncertain shifting, like something was rearranging itself without his permission.
He pressed his hand flat against his abdomen, almost reflexively.
Fine, he told himself. Just full. You ate a lot.
He picked up his phone and started scrolling. Ilya came and dropped onto the other end of the couch with his water glass and a comfortable sigh.
Twenty minutes passed. Shane's stomach made a sound he didn't love. A wet, unhappy gurgle that seemed to originate somewhere below his navel and radiate upward.
"Mm," he said, without meaning to.
Ilya glanced over. "What."
"Nothing. Just—" Shane shifted position, drawing one knee up. The unease in his gut had clarified somewhat. It wasn't hunger. It wasn't comfortable fullness anymore. It was something cooler and more insistent, sitting at the back of his throat now in a way that made him swallow once, carefully. "My stomach feels a little off."
"Probably the wine," Ilya said, looking back at his phone.
"I didn't drink that much."
"Probably the crab tower," Ilya amended.
Shane opened his mouth to argue and then didn't, because something about the phrase crab tower had just sent a very specific, very unmistakable wave of nausea rolling through him - hot at the back of his throat, watery at the sides of his mouth, accompanied by a clench low in his abdomen that made him go very still.
"Don't say that again," he said.
Ilya looked over, more attentively this time. He had a particular look he got when he was assessing Shane for something worth worrying about - a narrowing of his eyes, a slight tilt of his head, a stillness that sat strangely on someone almost never still. "You feel sick?"
"I feel weird. I'm sure it's—" Shane stopped. The clench in his abdomen had moved, migrated, sharpened. It wasn't nausea anymore. Or not only nausea. There was a lower component to it now, a deep cramping pressure that was communicating something urgent in a direction he was not prepared to think about. "Hold on."
He was on his feet before he'd fully processed the decision.
The bathroom was down the hall. He made it and got the door closed behind him, and the next several minutes were deeply, comprehensively humiliating in a way that had nothing to do with vomiting - in a way that was somehow worse, more ignominious, his body making furiously urgent decisions without his consultation, everything from dinner making clear it had never intended to stay. He sat on the toilet with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands and breathed through his mouth and waited for his abdomen to stop cramping, which it did eventually, reluctantly, leaving him shaky and cold-sweated and profoundly unhappy.
He sat there for a moment in the aftermath.
Then the nausea - which had been waiting, apparently, for this to finish - rose decisively, and he turned and was on his knees in front of the toilet and everything else from dinner was making a separate, equally emphatic return trip, the wine sharp and acidic, the crab—
He did not think about the crab.
He sat back on his heels when the first wave passed. His whole body felt slick with cold sweat. His hands were shaking. He pressed his forearm on the toilet seat and rested his head on it and breathed very carefully and waited to see if there was more.
There was more.
By the time he sat back against the cabinet under the sink, he'd been in the bathroom for close to fifteen minutes. He was exhausted in a preliminary way that suggested this was the beginning of something, not the end. His mouth tasted terrible. His abdomen was still producing low, intermittent cramps that rolled through him like aftershocks and made him draw his knees up instinctively.
He heard a knock on the door.
"Shane."
Ilya's voice. He sounded, even through the door, like he had a very specific question.
"I'm okay," Shane said. His voice was rougher than expected.
"I need—" A pause. "I also need the bathroom."
Shane looked at the toilet. Looked at the door. Processed this.
"Use the ensuite," he said.
"I am going to," Ilya said, with the clipped efficiency of someone who was not in a position to have a longer conversation about it, and Shane heard his footsteps moving fast down the hall toward the bedroom.
He sat against the cabinet and stared at the middle distance and thought, with crystalline clarity: oh, we're in trouble.
It became quickly apparent that two bathrooms were not going to feel like enough.
Shane made it out of the hall bathroom after twenty minutes, rinsed his mouth, splashed water on his face, and made the mistake of looking at himself in the mirror. He was gray. Not pale - gray, the specific color of someone whose body was in open revolt, his forehead damp, the skin under his eyes looking thin and bruised. He looked like he'd played a game, blocked three shots with his shin, and then gone directly to a very unfortunate dinner.
He went to check on Ilya.
The bedroom door was open and the ensuite light was on and when Shane reached the doorway he could see Ilya through the open bathroom door, kneeling on the tile in front of the toilet, one forearm on the seat, exactly mirroring how Shane had looked ten minutes ago. His back was to Shane and his shoulders were curved inward, the shirt pulling across them, and he was very still in the particular way that meant he was waiting.
"Hey," Shane said.
Ilya's head turned slightly. He didn't lift it. "How bad," he said. His voice was rough too.
"Both directions," Shane said, because there was no point in being delicate about it at this stage.
A moment of silence.
"Yes," Ilya agreed, flatly, which meant the same was true for him and he was not happy about it.
Shane went to the linen closet and got a spare hand towel and ran it under cold water at the sink and came to crouch next to Ilya and pressed it to the back of his neck, which was hot and damp.
Ilya made a low sound that was either gratitude or misery and probably both.
"Pedialyte," Shane said, thinking out loud. "We need Pedialyte. I think there's some under the sink still from February."
"In a moment," Ilya said.
"Soon. We're going to get dehydrated if we—"
"Shane." Ilya's voice was patient and strained in equal measure. "In a moment."
Shane stayed crouched next to him, holding the cold cloth to the back of his neck. Ilya's hand found the side of Shane's knee and gripped it once, briefly, before letting go. Shane watched his shoulders and the slow careful rhythm of his breathing and the way he was managing himself through it - calibrated, deliberate, giving nothing away unnecessarily - and felt an entirely irrational wave of love for him.
Then Ilya was sick again, and Shane held the back of his shirt away from the toilet and kept the cloth against his neck and rubbed one slow circle between his shoulder blades.
When it passed, Ilya sat back on his heels. His face was awful. Pale and drawn and sweating, his jaw tight, his eyes closed.
"Okay?" Shane asked.
"No," Ilya said.
"Fair."
"You should not be in here," Ilya said. "You are also sick."
"I'm between rounds," Shane said.
Ilya opened one eye and looked at him. "Between rounds," he repeated.
"It comes in waves. I'm in a trough."
"You are describing your food poisoning like it is a hockey game."
"I'm describing it like someone who played through a broken finger for six weeks," Shane said. "Read the situation, use the gaps."
"You are insane," Ilya said, with something approaching fondness despite everything.
"I'm going to get the Pedialyte," Shane said, and stood up too fast, which was a mistake - a wave of dizziness swung through him and he put his hand on the wall and waited for it to pass, the nausea resurfacing briefly and unpleasantly at the change in elevation. He breathed through it.
"Slowly," Ilya said, watching him.
"I'm fine."
"You just went gray."
"I was already gray."
"Grayer," Ilya said.
Shane breathed through his nose until everything settled, and then went carefully to the other bathroom, found the Pedialyte under the sink - fruit punch flavor, two bottles, thank god for past-Shane's preparedness - and a package of saltines that were definitely not fresh but would do, and two cold cloths, and the small plastic bin that lived under the sink for cleaning supplies that he relocated for practical purposes.
He came back and Ilya had moved - off his knees to sitting on the bathroom floor, back against the tub, legs out in front of him. He was still in his dinner shirt. His face had not improved.
Shane sat down across from him, back against the cabinet, the toilet between them like a reluctant centerpiece. He set the bin within reach. He handed Ilya a cold cloth and a bottle of Pedialyte.
Ilya took both without comment. He pressed the cloth to his face and held it there and just breathed for a moment.
"Small sips," Shane said.
"I know how to drink," Ilya said, muffled by the cloth.
"I'm just saying. Too fast and it comes back up. I know because I have already learned this lesson."
Ilya lowered the cloth. He looked at Shane. "When."
"February. The stomach bug. I drank half a glass of water too fast and immediately—" Shane made a gesture.
Ilya grimaced. "I was in Tampa in February."
"I know. I texted you about it."
"You texted me that you had 'a small stomach thing' and you were 'handling it.'"
"I was handling it."
"You were alone with a stomach bug and you did not tell me how bad it was," Ilya said, and the look on his face was the very specific look it got when he'd learned retroactively that Shane had been in some kind of distress without him - his jaw tight, something gone flat behind his eyes.
"I genuinely was handling it," Shane said. "This is worse. This is objectively worse."
Ilya's expression said he was filing this away for a longer conversation when he was not currently on a bathroom floor, and Shane appreciated the restraint.
They both took small, careful sips of Pedialyte. The fruit punch flavor was aggressively artificial in a way that sat unpleasantly on Shane's still-uncertain stomach, but he kept drinking because he knew what happened if he didn't.
"How long does food poisoning last," Ilya said.
"Depends. Usually twelve to twenty-four hours for the acute part." Shane ran a hand over his face. "Sometimes longer."
"Twenty-four hours," Ilya said.
"The worst part is usually shorter. Eight to twelve."
Ilya was quiet, processing this arithmetic.
"It is eleven o'clock," he said.
"Yeah."
"So until at least seven in the morning."
"Probably."
Another silence.
"I have a morning skate on Thursday," Ilya said, which was two days away and completely irrelevant right now, but Shane understood the impulse - the reaching for the normal schedule, the framework, as though it could impose some order on the chaos currently happening inside them.
"You'll be okay by Thursday," Shane said. "You'll be wrung out tomorrow but the acute phase should be—" His own stomach chose this exact moment to send a sharp, decisive signal, and he was on his feet and the toilet situation resolved itself without much dignity for the second time that night, and Ilya, to his credit, said nothing and refilled the cold cloth from the sink without being asked.
By midnight the pattern had established itself with grim predictability.
Every thirty to forty minutes, one or both of them needed the bathroom - and the brutal, demoralizing reality of this particular illness was that it was never just one thing. It cycled, unpredictably, between the two expressions of a body trying to rid itself of something toxic as fast as possible. Sometimes Shane would think the vomiting was done and then discover it wasn't. Sometimes what started as nausea redirected itself. There was no orderly queue to it, no polite sequencing. It was comprehensive and unsparing and completely indifferent to the dignity of two men who had been photographed on magazine covers.
The cramping was the worst part.
Shane had played through muscle cramps, through groin pulls and bruised ribs and the kind of full-body exhaustion that came from overtime playoff hockey in June. This was different. This was deep and visceral and involuntary - waves of pain that rolled from his lower abdomen outward and had nothing to do with anything he could control or push through. He could manage his pain tolerance when he had agency over it. There was no managing this. It happened and he breathed through it and waited for it to let go and then it happened again.
Ilya was having the same problem. Shane could tell by the way he held himself in between - very still, one arm across his midsection, jaw set - and by the sounds that traveled through the walls when it was bad. Sounds Shane had never heard from him before. Sounds that made him want to go in and do something useful and made it additionally difficult that he was often in identical straits himself at the same moment.
Around twelve-fifteen they had their worst overlap.
Shane was in the hall bathroom - on his knees again, the bin from the ensuite having been relocated here when the pattern became clear, because there had been one deeply unpleasant few minutes earlier where both exits were occupied simultaneously and the overlap had required some extremely fast decision-making that neither of them was going to discuss in detail - when he heard Ilya's voice from the bedroom.
"Shane."
Low and urgent and not quite right.
Shane assessed his own immediate situation. Made a calculation. Called back: "One minute."
"I need—" Ilya stopped. "The other bathroom is—I need a minute."
"It's occupied," Shane said, not helpfully. "Can you—"
"Obviously not," Ilya said, in a tone that communicated clearly that if he could he would.
Shane finished as fast as he could and flushed and didn't take the time to do anything else before opening the door, and Ilya was right there, which told him exactly how close it had been, and he stepped out of the way and Ilya was in the door before Shane had fully cleared it.
Shane stood in the hallway for a moment.
He went to the kitchen and got more cold water. He refilled the Pedialyte bottles, which they'd been slowly working through. He opened the saltines, ate one carefully, waited to see how it sat. It sat neutrally. He ate one more.
He went back to the hall bathroom door and knocked softly. "Still in there?"
"What do you think," Ilya said, from the other side of the door.
"Just checking. I have water."
A pause.
"Thank you," Ilya said. It came out quieter than intended, Shane thought. The way things came out when you were too depleted to maintain the usual register.
Shane sat down with his back against the wall outside the bathroom door. He pulled his knees to his chest. He ate another saltine and listened to his own stomach and waited.
The door opened after a few minutes. Ilya came out and his face was - there was no good word for it. Hollowed. All the usual vitality drained out, the charisma that he wore as naturally as his skin currently absent, just a person at the end of a very bad couple of hours. His hair was a disaster. He had a line on his cheek from where he'd been pressing against his forearm.
He saw Shane sitting on the floor and sat down next to him, right next to him, shoulder to shoulder.
Shane handed him water.
"Slow," Shane said.
"I know," Ilya said. He took a small sip. Another. He let his head drop back against the wall and stared at the ceiling. "How are you doing it," he said.
"Doing what."
"You keep getting up. You keep doing things." Ilya gestured vaguely at the water, the crackers. "I can barely—"
"I have to do something," Shane said. "If I'm not doing something I'm just lying there waiting for the next one and I can't stand that."
Ilya turned his head and looked at him. Even destroyed he had that quality of seeing Shane clearly. "You are doing the thing," he said. "Making yourself useful so you do not have to feel it."
Shane opened his mouth.
"You make lists when you are scared," Ilya said. "You manage things. The Pedialyte, the crackers, you found the only part of this you can control."
Shane closed his mouth.
"I'm not criticizing," Ilya said. "I am saying I know you."
"Yeah," Shane said, after a moment. "I know."
"Also the crackers are good," Ilya added. "I will have one."
Shane handed him the sleeve.
At twelve-forty Shane had an episode bad enough that Ilya heard it from the hallway and came in regardless of whether he'd been invited, and crouched behind Shane and held his hair back from his face with one hand - Shane's hair was not long, practically speaking, but Ilya gathered what there was of it anyway, holding it at the back of his head in a loose fist - and kept his other hand flat and warm between Shane's shoulder blades.
Shane was too sick to feel embarrassed about it.
"I've got you," Ilya said, quietly, and meant it practically - the hand, the steadiness behind him - but it reached Shane somewhere below the practical level.
When it was over Shane sat back and Ilya handed him the cloth without being asked and Shane pressed it to his face and breathed, in and out, waiting for his hands to stop shaking. The cramping was still there, lower, a persistent grinding misery.
"You're pale," Ilya said.
"I'm usually pale."
"Paler. You are the color of the tile."
"Thank you." Shane lowered the cloth. "Thank you for that."
"I am being accurate."
"I know. I don't need you to be accurate right now, I need you to be—" Shane considered. "Not accurate."
"You look very handsome," Ilya said, in the exact same tone he'd said the tile thing.
Shane laughed, which made his stomach lurch, which made him press his hand to his mouth for a reflexive terrifying second - but it passed. He lowered his hand. "Don't make me laugh."
"You laughed yourself."
"It was involuntary."
Ilya settled back against the tub, closer than before. His knee was against Shane's leg. He was watching him with careful attention, the kind he brought to the ice when something was wrong but he wasn't sure yet what it was.
"How is the cramping," he said.
"Still pretty bad. You?"
"Also bad." He pressed his palm to his lower abdomen briefly, which Shane recognized because he'd been doing the same thing all night. "It is the kind of pain that makes me want to curl up and not move but also moving is the only thing that helps slightly."
"Yeah." Shane drew one knee to his chest. "The heating pad might help. When we're stable enough to stay in one place long enough."
"Where is it."
"Linen closet."
"Later," Ilya said.
"Yeah. Later."
They sat in the bathroom together in the quiet, listening to the house. Shane's stomach was doing something complicated that he was monitoring with cautious attention - not immediate, not urgent, but not gone. It was the exhausting part of this: the never-quite-knowing, the constant triage, the inability to rest because resting felt like a trap.
"I need to tell you something," Ilya said.
Shane looked at him warily. "What."
"I also feel bad about the February stomach bug."
Shane blinked. "What? Why are you bringing that up right now?"
"Because you brought it up earlier and I have been thinking about it. You were alone and sick and you told me it was small."
"It was—"
"It was not small. I know you. 'A small stomach thing' means you were on the bathroom floor."
"I was managing—"
"Shane." Ilya's voice was steady. "I know you do not like to worry me. I know you think it is better to handle things and tell me after. But I want to know. Even when I am in Tampa. Even when there is nothing I can do." He paused. "Next time you call me."
Shane looked at him. His eyes felt hot in a way that was probably just dehydration.
"Okay," he said.
"I mean it."
"I know. Okay."
Ilya nodded, apparently satisfied. Then he leaned sideways and his head came down onto Shane's shoulder, and Shane turned his face into Ilya's hair - damp and warm, slightly terrible, completely familiar - and just stayed there.
"I'm going to call you," Shane said, into his hair.
"Good."
"Even if it's nothing."
"Even if it is nothing."
"You're going to answer."
"I always answer you," Ilya said, with a simplicity that made Shane's chest ache.
They migrated to the bedroom floor around one.
The decision was practical - closer to the ensuite, carpeted, a defensible position that represented a minor upgrade from the tile. Ilya got the pillows and the throw blanket from the chair. Shane got the heating pad, which turned out to be a transformative development - low heat against cramping abdomens, passed back and forth with the Pedialyte in a kind of miserable economy of comfort.
Shane was on his back with the heating pad on his stomach and his eyes closed, cataloguing sensations. The nausea had downgraded from acute to background, which was progress. The cramping was intermittent now rather than constant. His body felt like it had been emptied and wrung out - hollow and shaky and cold in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature, which was July-warm.
Ilya was next to him, on his side facing away, and Shane could see the tension in his back when the cramps hit - the subtle contraction, the held breath, the slow release.
"Bad?" Shane asked, the third time he saw it.
"Medium," Ilya said. "Coming in waves still."
"Same." Shane lifted the heating pad. "Here."
Ilya turned over and Shane pressed it against his lower abdomen and Ilya closed his eyes and exhaled slowly.
"Thank you," he said.
"Yeah."
They lay in the amber light from the cracked bathroom door. Shane tracked his own body with the attention of someone who had learned, through years of professional athletics, exactly how to listen to what it was telling him. Right now it was telling him: depleted, wrung out, not finished but closer to finished than you were an hour ago. He held that information carefully.
"Are you going to be sick again," he asked.
"I don't know," Ilya said. "Maybe."
"Me too. Maybe."
A pause.
"This is terrible," Ilya said, with deep feeling.
"Yeah."
"I have been injured many times. I have had the flu. I broke my wrist and played two more periods before they told me it was broken." Ilya paused. "This is worse than the wrist."
"It's a different category of bad," Shane said. "The wrist was—it was pain. This is your body not doing what you tell it. I hate that more."
Ilya turned his head and looked at him. "Yes," he said. "Exactly."
Ilya did this sometimes - said yes, exactly to something Shane had said, like Shane had named a thing Ilya had been carrying without the words for it. Shane had never gotten entirely used to it.
"We're going to be okay," Shane said. For about the third time tonight.
"You keep saying this."
"Because it's true."
"I know it's true," Ilya said. "I am not worried we will not be okay. I am allowed to be miserable about the process."
"Fair," Shane said.
"I am very miserable."
"I know. Me too."
Shane felt him exhale. Felt the slight relaxation of his body alongside his, the controlled tension releasing into just the exhausted reality of it.
"Ilya," Shane said.
"Mm."
"On a scale of one to ten."
"Seven," Ilya said immediately. "Down from nine. You?"
"Six and a half." Shane looked at the ceiling. "That's actually progress."
"It is." A pause. "I will take it."
At one forty-five Shane had what he desperately hoped was the last of it, which lasted long enough and was unpleasant enough that he ended up sitting on the bathroom floor afterward simply because getting up felt like too ambitious a project. He pressed his back to the wall and his knees to his chest and put his face in his hands and just breathed, slow and deliberate, through the remnants of it.
He heard Ilya's voice from the bedroom. "Shane?"
"I'm fine," he said, for what was probably the fifteenth time tonight.
A short silence, and then Ilya appeared in the bathroom doorway. He was also clearly post-bathroom, his face doing the specific thing it did after the worst of it - carefully blank, jaw set, eyes a little glassy. He'd been sick again in the ensuite, Shane had heard it. He was holding a glass of water and the heating pad and he looked absolutely destroyed and he had come anyway.
He sat down on the floor next to Shane.
"Here," he said, and handed him the water and put the heating pad in his lap and that was all, no words attached to it.
Shane looked down at the heating pad. Looked at Ilya. Ilya's head had dropped back against the wall and his eyes were closed and he was breathing through his nose in the careful rhythm he used when he was managing something.
"You didn't have to get up," Shane said.
"I know."
"You were just sick."
"I know."
"You should be lying down."
"Shane," Ilya said, eyes still closed. "Stop talking about it."
Shane was quiet.
"I heard you," Ilya said. "I wanted to know you were okay. That is all."
Shane looked at him for a long moment in the dim amber light, at the familiar lines of his face with nothing left to perform, and stayed quiet. They were both here. That was the whole thing.
He leaned sideways until his head was on Ilya's shoulder.
Ilya didn't say anything. His hand came up and rested on Shane's knee.
They sat on the bathroom floor at one forty-five in the morning and just breathed.
"This is your fault," Shane said.
"I know," Ilya said.
"I'm going to tell my mom it was your fault."
"She will believe you immediately," Ilya said, with what sounded almost like admiration.
"She really will."
"She will say I should have taken you to the pasta place."
"She will say that specifically, yes."
"I love your mother," Ilya said, which was not the sentence Shane expected, but Ilya meant it straightforwardly and sincerely in the way he'd learned to mean things about the Hollanders. "She will also send soup. And she will call it your soup but she will put enough for two."
"She will put enough for four," Shane said. "Because she'll want to make sure."
A quiet beat.
"I want the soup," Ilya said.
"Me too."
"I want it now."
"I know." Shane pressed his forehead briefly to Ilya's shoulder. "Tomorrow. Or—it's already tomorrow. Today. When it's daylight."
Ilya made a sound of acceptance. His hand turned on Shane's knee, palm up. Shane took it without looking.
The worst of it - and Shane had been tracking this very carefully, the way he tracked a game situation, clock and conditions - was over by around three in the morning.
He knew because the gap between events lengthened from thirty minutes to an hour to something that, when he woke up from a half-doze on the bedroom floor, had become two hours. His stomach was making sounds, but monitoring sounds, not urgent ones. The cramping had downgraded to an ache. His body felt like it had been scraped out, hollow and aching and exhausted in every fiber, but the immediate crisis had the quality of something winding down rather than building.
Ilya was asleep next to him, or close to it - his breathing had the slow, slightly unguarded quality of someone who had finally stopped bracing. He was on his back with the throw blanket pulled to his chin despite the warmth, which Shane recognized as the body-chilling aftermath of prolonged illness.
Shane lay still and catalogued carefully. Nausea: low, manageable. Cramping: background level. Dizziness when he'd lifted his head: less than before. He was deeply thirsty in a way that felt different from the dangerous thirsty of peak dehydration - more like a normal, reasonable thirst. He reached for the Pedialyte without sitting up and drank half of what was left, slowly, waiting after each sip. It stayed down. It was going to stay down.
He set the bottle down.
He thought about the last several hours. About the two of them taking turns, checking on each other, handing off the heating pad and the cold cloth and the crackers with the quiet efficiency of people who had learned each other's languages a long time ago. About Ilya getting up when he was sick himself because he'd heard something in Shane's voice. About the way Ilya had held his hair back and the matter-of-fact steadiness of his hands.
About sitting on the bathroom floor at two in the morning, heads together, too tired for anything but being near each other.
He reached sideways and found Ilya's hand.
Ilya stirred, fingers curling around his without waking up.
Shane looked at the ceiling and thought about the restaurant - about the white wine and the setting sun and the crab tower that had cost fifty-four dollars and contained, apparently, the seeds of their collective undoing. He thought about how good the evening had been, genuinely, right up until it wasn't. He thought about how somewhere in the middle of the worst of this, he hadn't actually been afraid, which was interesting.
"Ilya," he said, quietly.
Ilya made a low sound.
"I think we're okay."
A pause. Ilya's fingers tightened briefly around his. "Yeah?" he said, rough and half-asleep.
"Yeah. I think the worst is done."
Another pause, longer.
"Good," Ilya said, and then: "The dog."
Shane blinked. "What."
"You said we are getting the dog."
"That was—I said that at like midnight, I was delirious."
"You said it."
"I was in the middle of food poisoning—"
"You said it," Ilya repeated, with the immovable certainty of someone who has been waiting for this opening for approximately sixteen months. His eyes were still closed. He did not look like someone who was negotiating. He looked like someone who was stating a conclusion already reached.
Shane opened his mouth.
"You said the dog can get help," Ilya said. "Like Lassie. You made a good argument."
"I made a delirious argument."
"It was also good." A pause. "I have been looking. There is a breeder. Golden retriever. There is a litter in September."
"You've been looking?"
"For many months," Ilya said serenely.
Shane lay on the bedroom floor in the quiet and stared at the ceiling and felt, even through the exhaustion and the wrecked-out hollowness and the ambient misery of the night they'd just had, something he couldn't quite name and didn't try to.
"His name is Gretzky," Shane said.
Ilya opened one eye. "You already have a name."
"I've had the name for a while."
"You said no every month."
"I was strategically holding the name in reserve," Shane said, which was not true at all.
Ilya closed the eye. His mouth had done the thing it did when he was trying not to smile. "Gretzky," he said.
"Gretzky."
"This is a very Canadian name."
"He will be a very Canadian dog. He will go to games. He will wear a jersey." Shane paused. "Your jersey, probably. He'll have better taste than me."
Ilya's chest moved. A laugh that didn't quite make it out - too careful, too aware of the stomach situation - but present anyway, somewhere in there.
"We should get in bed," Shane said.
"Yes," Ilya agreed, and didn't move.
"Ilya."
"In a moment."
"You keep saying that."
"Because the floor is acceptable and the bed requires effort and I am very tired," Ilya said, with complete and reasonable dignity.
Shane looked at him. At the familiar lines of his face in the amber light. At the hand still loosely holding his. At the blanket pulled to his chin and the slight furrow between his brows and all of it - all of the exhausted, wrecked, unglamorous reality of this person he'd chosen and kept choosing every single day for years.
"Okay," Shane said. "In a moment."
"Yes," Ilya said.
They made it into bed around three-thirty.
Yuna texted at nine-fifteen the next morning asking how the restaurant was.
Shane stared at his phone for a long moment. Typed: It was good! Nice view :) Stared at that. Added: Maybe don't try the crab tower tho. Deleted that. Sent the original.
Ilya, reading over his shoulder from horizontal, said "good choice" and went back to sleep.
They spent the day in bed, or near it - moving between the bed and the couch with the slow careful conservatism of people who had learned overnight that the distance between those two locations was relevant. Toast. Ginger ale. More Pedialyte. Intermittent sleep. The heating pad making slow circuits. Not much conversation, but a particular quality of quiet that had its own language.
By evening Shane ate half a bowl of plain rice and felt, cautiously, like himself again. Ilya ate most of a bowl and declared that he was fully recovered, and then fell asleep on the couch at eight-thirty, which Shane felt spoke for itself.
They did not speak of the crab tower for approximately two weeks.
After that Ilya brought it up at Hayden's kitchen table over a different, significantly safer dinner - the coastal remoulade - and the story came out in pieces, interrupting each other, editing each other's edits, and by the end of it Hayden was crying with laughter and his wife was looking between them with the expression of someone who had not expected this evening to go this direction, and Shane thought: yeah, okay. Yeah, it's a story now.
They did not go back to the restaurant.
They did get the dog.
In September, from a breeder in Kanata, a golden retriever puppy with paws too big for his body and absolutely no indoor decorum whatsoever. Gretzky was on Ilya's Instagram four times before Shane's once, always with an expression of great self-satisfaction, because Gretzky was a dog with opinions and one of his opinions was that Ilya was the correct person to sit on.
Shane didn't argue.