Work Text:
Feburary 2017
Rose asked a lot of questions. Shane spent a good chunk of his life being asked questions but these questions were usually along the lines of What do you think the team could have done better going into this game? or How’s team morale going into the playoffs? or Any comment on Hockey Canada's latest report on racial harassment in NHL front offices? Questions he understood how to answer, namely by saying as little as possible.
Even with his parents, conversation typically veered into hockey territory, despite his dad’s best efforts to redirect them. This had never bothered him before. Hockey took up such a huge part of his life that any discussion of his life necessarily was a discussion about hockey. He didn’t know how he could answer a question like how are you? without breaking down their chances of making playoffs that season.
Rose asked him about movies and sent him albums. They went to a museum and talked about which paintings they liked. She took him to a winery once, when he had a rare two days off in a row. She spent an afternoon with him getting tipsy and talking; about which wines they liked and didn’t like, about whether dark or light wood was better for flooring, about how badly they were going to feel in the morning for breaking the diets their nutritionists had them on.
Shane tried not to, because he liked Rose so much, liked her even after she very gently broke up with him, but he spent a lot of the time they were dating thinking about Ilya.
Ilya was not like Rose. This is what Shane thought about. Ilya would be hard to be in a relationship with. Even if there was no rivalry, no hockey, no question about them both being men - he thought Ilya would be hard to be in a relationship with anyway.
Ilya hated answering questions. Or at least he hated answering Shane's. Sometimes, after sex, he could be coaxed into pillow talk, might even initiate it. He might answer questions then, even if they dug into the past further back than two weeks ago. He was usually willing to answer questions about sex. Shane didn't mind, that much. Those questions gave him what he needed anyway, an idea of who Rozanov was, who he had been before Shane.
Other times, he had almost a physical response, his face and body closed off, his tone turning cold, distant. These moods came upon him often and predictably. Shane could flip it on like a switch, if he wanted to. He could make a guide to shutting Ilya off if he wanted to: 1) questions about Russia; 2) questions about his childhood; 3) questions about the Russian text messages that lit his phone up, buzz after angry buzz, until Ilya would simply toss the phone out of the room, seemingly unconcerned about what would happen if it shattered.
Ilya didn’t like to ask many questions either, not about Shane. Shane had thought in those early years that Rozanov just wasn’t that interested in his life. He could have been content with that, but every now and then, there would be a small slip, keeping him off-balance. Ilya would reveal too much, details of where Shane had been for a shoot, of a brand he had just partnered with, an event he had attended. He just never asked about it. Shane would have told him, if he asked.
It sometimes felt like Ilya was keeping score for a different game than Shane was, one only he knew the rules to, and if he started losing he pulled away, like a scared child. Even in the best case scenario, Shane would have to resign himself to that, to always taking the first step, to chasing after him, to pulling him back in again and again and again.
And even imagining the other way around - even if Rozanov was different. The situation was impossible. Shane knew for sure now that this was all life had in store for him; that impossible was always going to have been his only option. But Ilya was even more impossible than the million other impossibilities.
And Shane would have to choose that. He would have to face the obvious truth that if he asked this of Ilya, one day they might both wake up and Shane would turn over to look at him and think I’ve ruined your life and mine, and choose that anyway. Worse, he would have to ask Ilya to choose that - to let Shane make his life more difficult by loving him as much as he did.
It will never get better, he imagines telling Ilya. There's nothing we can do to make it easier. No matter how he tries, he can't formulate a better pitch, one that will make Ilya want this more. He's not sure he wants to.
He has three days off before the All-Stars game in Florida. He has three days before he has to make the choice.
He spends them in an obnoxiously large hotel room with Rose, who brings a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc that professes itself to have zero calories, zero sugar and zero carbs, a blissful match up for both of their diets. Shane brings nothing, except for increasing anxiety about the upcoming All-Stars game, a feeling which only makes him want to drink more -
“Alcohol kills your gains,” he tells her, on the floor with his back leaning against a leather couch. She makes a shushing noise and shoves a dime-sized block of vegan cheddar into his mouth. This too, is meant to be low-calorie, and is going to fuck up his diet but is probably good for hers.
“You know why we were a bad couple?” She asks him, and he licks wine out from the webbing between his fingers and blinks at her.
“Besides the obvious, I mean.” She doesn’t wait for him to continue, collapsing on the floor next to him, her dress hiked up past her hips so she can sit cross-legged. “You wouldn’t even eat my fries. That’s how boyfriends work. I order fries, eat three, and then I watch you eat the rest. Then I swallow my drool and it’s almost as good as if I ate them.”
“Did your other gay boyfriends eat your fries?” The vegan cheddar tastes like plastic, which scares him. Something sharp on the couch behind him is digging into the back of his neck, where he’s leaning against it. He pushes his head further back experimentally, but it doesn’t give way.
“Yes,” she says. “That’s why I dated them.”
“You still dated me, even though I didn’t eat your fries,” he points out and she lolls her head to the side to smile at him.
“You were so good at kissing," she tells him. "So I was willing to forgive it."
Shane thinks about how he kisses girls, his hands on their jaws, thumbs on their cheekbones, always in his head about where he would go next or how he should be feeling. Ilya always kissed him like he was trying to bruise Shane's mouth. Maybe that was how Ilya kissed everyone, a thought which made Shane nauseated.
"Really?" He asks dubiously. He had never been that into it - kissing girls. He liked kissing Ilya.
She nods. "You have very soft lips."
She asks him about his first kiss, because she likes to ask questions, and he asks her about her favourite. Shane hadn't known, before Rose, that there was so much to say about kissing.
They drift closer, and then farther apart, and then back together, and Shane luxuriates in it all, the contact, the human touch. He had thought for a moment, leaving Boston, that he would never have this again. It's nice to know that it could still exist, physical closeness without the cold sinking weight of dread, even if he couldn't get it where he wanted it the most.
“He’s going to break up with me,” she says into his neck at one point, voice trembling, and he rubs her back, up and down like he’s seen his dad do with his mother. It’s nice, the heavy warmth of her, the way her chest rises and falls against his. “He’s going to break up with me because I’m bad at sex.”
“You’re not bad at sex,” Shane says, which he thinks is true. He couldn’t really remember either of their attempts, most of it slipping into a blurry haze, his memories black and flickering at the edges - but that was how sex usually was for him, with women. He only remembered the times it had been really bad, like when Katie Larson had almost vomited going down on him, and then nearly castrated him in her panic.
“He’s probably gay too,” he tells Rose, which unfortunately makes her cry.
“I’m bad at sex because I keep fucking gay guys,” she says, sniffling but also laughing, the way nobody in his life does except her, and then she wraps herself around him. Her arms and legs cross behind his back, surrounding him. He tries, clumsily, to return the gesture as best he can, but she's so small it seems impossible.
“Well,” Shane says, and then doesn’t say anything else because this seems like something that could probably be true.
Her heaving breaths against his shoulder, the cold, wet tip of her nose brushing his skin, the spreading wet patch of her tears; he lets her have it, sits through his skin crawling.
When she’s cried herself out, she pulls her head back, her arms straightening out and legs unfolding so she can hold Shane at arms length, still in his lap, and ask with watery eyes, “Have you ever sucked dick before?”
“Oh my god,” Shane says. “What?”
“You said you’d been with a guy before. Did you guys like - was it just handjobs, or what?”
Shane has spent the last thirty minutes hearing details about what seems like every sex act Rose has ever participated in. She had lit up when she described it, the words almost spilling out of her, like she couldn’t stop once she got started.
(“This is so weird,” she’d said, snorting with honest laughter halfway through a story about trying to eat pussy for the first time. “I normally can’t tell anyone about this stuff.”)
He wants that too, to let the words spill out of him without thinking. More than that, he wants someone to know about Ilya, who can tether their relationship to reality. Someone who will know, if everything in Florida goes the way Shane is dreading, that Shane has lost something.
“No, we like,” his hand comes up into the space between their bodies, makes a vague circling gesture. “We’ve done everything.”
Rose looks unconvinced, an eyebrow arching. “What, like everything?”
He shrugs. “All of the stuff you’ve mentioned, at least. And then some.”
Both eyebrows go up. “Even the handcuffs?”
Shane waits for the embarrassment to hit, but all he feels is the slightly dizzy rush of the wine, echoing in his head.
“Kind of? We didn’t have handcuffs,” he explains. “He used his belt.”
“And it’s,” she makes a face he can’t interpret, “it’s all been good?”
“What? Yes! Of course it’s all good.”
She raises her hands defensively. “Okay! I was just wondering. Not all of mine were good. As we’ve discussed.”
“You can’t imagine," Shane tells her, very seriously, "how much easier my life would have been if it was bad."
"So? Are you - ?" She gestures, wildly, rocking back dangerous where she's sitting just above his knees. He grabs her by her forearms before she can fall back, his eyebrows furrowing.
"Am I? What, gay?"
She shakes her head, laughing, exuberant, white teeth flashing under the stylishly dim hotel lighting. "No, are you good at it? Sucking dick?"
She whispers this last part, even though she'd said it at full volume a few seconds ago. Shane reaches clumsily for the table, and swallows more of the sugar-free, low-calorie wine. It tastes dry and papery in his mouth, more texture than flavour, but he finishes the glass anyway.
"I think so," he says finally, when he's set it back on the table. "I mean - I like it. I hear that counts for a lot."
He's not sure why this feels so good to say. He likes to be seen as good at things, maybe. Even blowjobs. Everyone mostly talked to him like he had never had sex before in his life, which was an image he'd worked very hard to project and preserve. Generally he thought, as long as he couldn't find it in himself to get married and have three children by 24, it was better to be seen as a prude than a faggot. If those were the only options available to him.
He's never had anyone to brag to before about how good he was at blowjobs, how fast he could make Ilya come, how quickly he had learned - no one except Ilya, who already knew these things, by virtue of having been the one to teach Shane. He hadn't even known it was an option. He still didn't know if this was normal - asking your friends about how good they were at sucking dick. Maybe this was how friendship worked for other people, if you weren't both hockey players, if one of you wasn't married, if your friendship didn't depend so much on knowing as little about each other as possible. If you knew the other person liked sucking dick.
Maybe he just likes it when Rose looks at him like that, awestruck, like he's scored a hattrick. He doesn't know anyone else who would be this impressed by his knowledge of having sex with men, which is unfair, seeing how long he's worked to build it.
Maybe that's why he ends up where he does, one arm extended to stick two fingers in Rose's mouth, her pink lipgloss sticky, smearing around his fingers, three of her fingers pressed as far as they can go into his, both of them drooling and stifling little snorts of laughter.
"I guesh - I usushually," he presses his tongue up against the bony outgrowth of her joint. Her fingers are so thin, even with three of them.
She mimics the motion with her own tongue against his fingers, and then mimics him again when he hollows his cheeks. He can't bring himself to close his eyes, so when her eyes start to crinkle around the edges, he knows to pull his fingers out. He manages just in time, her mouth spreading into a wide grin as she breaks into wheezing, choked laughter, spit trailing from her mouth.
"I don't think that's it," she says, laughing so hard that Shane can't help but to echo it, grinning and shoving at her like he's ten years old. "That cannot be the technique of someone who likes it."
"Well, it's hard with fingers!" He says, wiping at the spit that's falling down his chin. She makes no move to copy him. "And it's weird with you staring at me like that!"
She's still laughing as she gets up, pulling her dress back down past her hips as she goes to the mini-fridge. "Forget it, I just wasn't meant to be good at sucking dick."
Shane doesn't watch her go, he focuses his eyes on the individual fibres making up the carpet underneath them and counts them until he can work up the courage to ask, "You don't like it?"
"I guess not," she says, sounding a little muffled. Something clanks, from their little makeshift kitchen. "Or maybe I would like it more if I could find the right guy."
"Not a gay one," Shane says, and it feels crazy still to be saying gay like this, in reference to himself, out loud and unabashed, like it's just another fact about himself. Like anyone could know. He feels like a child with a new toy, hitting the same button over and over again to watch it light up. Again and again, he says it, just to test it, to make sure the world won't come crashing down around him. Again and again, the world keeps going. Rose just laughs, coming back around to the sitting area, with two glasses in one hand, three more full bottles in the other.
She passes him the fuller glass, both filled with an amber liquid he doesn't recognize. It burbles alarmingly, and emits a smell like burnt rubber.
"What is this?" He asks, looking up at where she's chugging her glass with her head tilted back and her nose plugged.
She swallows, grimaces, then smiles at him. "It's beer."
He sniffs at it again, flinching away at the way it singes his nostrils. "Let me guess. Low calorie?"
She falls on the floor, red-faced already, and bright-eyed. "And protein-enhanced."
"Shit," he says, and gives it another, more encouraging sniff. "What are the - "
"10 grams," she says proudly. "Probably closer to 15 in the glass I gave you."
He gives in and drinks it. It tastes almost exactly like it smells, and he regrets immediately not having plugged his nose the way that Rose had.
"And Jason's not gay," she says, "and I still don't like sucking his dick."
This is so far outside of Shane's experience that he's a little confused by the idea of it. "What don't you like about it?"
She takes a long time to think about it. He'd expected her, for some reason, to have an answer ready. Like this, it feels like this is the first time she's ever asked herself the question.
"I mean - the smell. And I don't like the feeling of it on my tongue. I keep wanting to close my mouth, and it's annoying when I can't. And I don't like when my jaw gets sore." He's not sure what expression he's making but she breaks off suddenly, her eyes wide. "Wow, you must really like it."
He bites his cheek, swallows his small, pleased smile down into his gut. "I like all of those parts, at least," he confesses.
She laughs again. The world keeps spinning.
"I've had multiple friends swear by it," she tells him, three glasses of the suspicious beer later, green eyes open and earnest. He wants to believe her. "Seriously, they do it, and if they don't dream of the guy they like, they know he's not the one. I've had two friends who had dreams about their person, and now they're married to them."
"I never remember my dreams," Shane says, more to talk himself out of it than anything else. "And I don't have any wedding cake."
Rose smiles. "I have a slice in my freezer."
"Rose."
"What?" She says, exasperated. "You don't want to know?"
Shane's back, at one point propped up against the front of the couch, has begun to slide lower and lower. He has to look up at Rose to answer. "It doesn't matter. It's - I already know. It's impossible."
She slides lower with him. Their necks are the only thing still held up by the couch at this point, and the angle is terrible. Bad for his shoulders. "Because of the gay thing?"
He laughs. He can't help it. He's been wondering the same thing. "I guess. Among other things."
"Can I meet him?"
“I don’t know,” he murmurs. Both of them are laying down now, on their sides so they can look at each other. The shadow of the massive couch looms overhead. Rose’s face is so close to his, he goes a little cross-eyed trying to look at her.
He remembers Ilya mouthing over a girl’s ear, his hand sliding up her chest to palm over her breast, unconcerned by the people around them. The lights had hit the planes of Ilya’s face at odd angles, making him look sharp and dangerous. Angry. Shane hadn’t felt angry then. He’d just felt sick. “I think he’s mad at me.”
"Oh fuck," Rose says. "Will he hate me? Because I'm the ex-wife?"
Shane snickers at that, at the melodrama of it and the image it inspires of Ilya Rozanov being, like, a hot secretary from a bad movie.
"I don't know," he says again, flopping over onto his back so he can smile up at the ceiling. "I don't think he'll care. He's not the jealous type. He doesn't - he sleeps with a lot of different women. We aren't exclusive or anything. I don't think he'd want to be."
"But you want to be." It isn't a question.
"Yes," he tells the ceiling light. "I want to be."
It's the first time he's said it out loud, and the words feel like a revelation. "I want to date him," he says, like he's chewing on the words, testing them. "I want him to like me."
"I'm sorry," she tells him, her soft, trembling mouth flattening out into a thin line. "I wish - I wish I could make this easier for you."
He hadn't realized until that moment, he thinks dazedly, how badly he had hoped that she might have a solution. That there might be a way out he hadn't thought of yet, one she could gently guide him to like she had in that restaurant, hold his hand the whole way there.
"Oh my god," he says, his voice shaking. "Fuck."
She brings her arm out, the bones of her elbow pressing insistently into his back, pulling him over towards her. He goes easily, lets himself press his face into her neck. It was always easy, with Rose, who was so determined to meet him in the middle. He wants to make it easy for Ilya in the same way. He doesn't know if he can.
August 2018
You won't believe it, she texts Shane, crumpled into the corner of her trailer, with three minutes to spare before her makeup artist arrives. He broke up with me.
Shane won't respond for hours. He's always busy, but this summer he's been busier than ever. She hadn't badgered him for a name and so hadn't been sure she'd ever know, who the man was that was taking up all his time, that had been taking it up before Rose had even come into his life. It was a nice surprise when Shane had facetimed her last year, cheeks flushed and eyes gleaming, to let her know that he'd gotten a boyfriend. It had been more of a shock to find out who the boyfriend was, but she'd done a good job of covering the shock with appropriate levels of joy and delight.
She thought Shane would make a good boyfriend. He'd been a good boyfriend to her, even though the everything else of the situation had been working against them. He'd carried her bags.
She swipes away the messaging app. Opens Google. She has 53 tabs open, and she navigates to number 23 with her fingers completely steady.
This tab is a nice time benchmark. She knows exactly when she opened it, so it helps her keep track of where in her search history she is. Helpful for when she needs to find something among the mass of tabs.
Google Images search results for Ilya Rozanov Madison Lawrence 2016 blanks out and then reloads. The girl is pretty, dark-haired, freckled. She was an up-and-coming model that year. Rose hasn't kept up with her career since. In the photos, Rozanov doesn't seem to be aware of the cameras at all. Madison Lawrence is tucked against his chest, her face against his neck, smile lines visible where the edge of her face peeks out. Rozanov has a grip on her waist, fingers splayed wide, his pinky just brushing the swell of her ass. She swipes. In this one, they're kissing, Madison Lawrence’s hands on Rozanov's face, Rozanov's hands fully on her ass. She's tall, nearly Rozanov's height in those heels.
She closes her eyes, breath coming a little faster. She imagines Shane in that position, greedy for it, pressing up against Rozanov like he doesn't care who sees them, his big, calloused hands sliding over Rozanov's body, all of its hard edges and sharp lines.
She imagines that night again, ruthlessly crushing the edge of embarassment that threatens to choke her when she remembers how long it had taken to get him hard, God, how had she not realized -
She imagines it again, her silver dress shiny and reflective, brushing sharp metal sequins against the soft skin of her thighs as she went to her knees. She pictures it the other way now, Shane's sweet, upturned face, freckles fading into flushed skin as she looked down at him. She remembers the way her fingers had felt in his mouth, the way they had made his mouth stretch obscenely, the soft swollen jut of his lower lip, shiny with spit. She remembers how her hands had felt clenched in his hair and adds that to the fantasy. Shane-not-Shane blinks up at her, his hands pressed into his thighs, eyes glazed over, and then he's coming forward, swallowing her whole, taking it all - not her fingers, but -
There's a knock on the door, to be polite, and then it opens without waiting for an answer, because this isn't really her space, her name on the door be damned, and because they're on a schedule, there are deadlines to meet, there are projected timelines that are shrinking by the day.
"Are you ready?" Tiana asks, and Rose can't place the tone in her voice before she realizes she's still crumpled in the corner, her phone clutched in her sweaty hands.
"Of course," she says, grinning. Closes all her apps, turns her phone off for good measure. She stands up and does not press her thighs together. She has a fucking job to do.