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Ilya groans as his phone rings for the third time. He’d ignored the first two rings as he debated not answering – it’s his day off so it can’t be anything important, and if it’s Shane he’ll leave a message – but the buzz of the phone on his mattress beside him feels like it’s rattling his brain inside his skull. Finally – more to make it stop than anything else – he rolls over and drags his thumb across the screen to answer, not even bothering to check the caller ID. “Yes?”
“Hi, Ilya.” Yuna Hollander’s voice, like everything else about her, is warm, even over the phone. “I didn’t wake you up, did I? I know it’s your day off.”
“No,” Ilya reassures her quickly. “I was awake.”
He’s getting used to this, now, the Hollanders keeping track of his schedule. He remembers expressing surprise to Shane the first time he’d found out that they were – for some reason he couldn’t comprehend – keeping a mental calendar of all his games and practices, matching it up with the identical (physical) calendar he knows they keep for Shane, somehow always knowing when Ilya would have a day off or a weekend at home alone. Shane had just looked at him as if this made all the sense in the world and said, “of course they are,” in a tone that had invited no argument.
He’s still getting used to being loved like this.
“You need something?” he asks Yuna, anticipating what the answer will be but still unable to shake the habit of being a provider.
And sure enough– “No, I’m just checking in.”
He’s getting used to this, too. It’s another facet of this whole thing that Shane had accepted easily, uncritically, not seeming to understand why it still surprises Ilya, sometimes, that his boyfriend’s parents will call him for no other reason than to see how he’s doing. Because to Shane, being cared about in these ways is the standard he’s been raised on his entire life.
But to Ilya, it’s revolutionary.
And it does nothing to assuage the profound guilt that gnaws away at him as he waits for them all to realize that he is not someone worth loving in these ways.
“What are you up to, today?” Yuna asks.
“Nothing,” Ilya answers honestly. I’m still in bed. I might stay here all day. The world feels too heavy right now and I don’t know why. None of these are answers he can give without inviting further questions he absolutely does not want to answer, so instead he says, “Just resting.”
“That’s good.” There’s a relief in Yuna’s voice that wouldn’t be there, if she knew the truth. “I’m glad you’re getting some rest.”
“Yes,” Ilya agrees, as if lying in bed until noon trying to work up the energy to shower can be considered restful. Better to let her think that he’s just recovering from a tough game, that there’s no deeper, more sinister reason for any of this.
“Listen,” Yuna continues, unperturbed by his lack of response, and this is one of the things he likes best about her, the way that she makes everything feel so effortless. “That big storm that they’ve been forecasting is supposed to start this afternoon, and if it’s as bad as everyone’s predicting it sounds like we might all be snowed in for at least a day. You’re welcome to come hunker down with us here, if you want to.”
The offer is so sweet and so unexpected that Ilya finds himself blinking back tears. And if he’s honest with himself, he really doesn’t want to be alone right now. But he also doesn’t have the energy to fake it today – he hardly has the energy to exist as it is – and he doesn’t know how to explain any of this to Yuna in a way that won’t cause her to worry.
“I think I will stay home,” he says, hoping she doesn’t hear the tightness in his voice, the longing for something that he’s not even sure how to articulate. “But thank you.”
Yuna accepts this easily. “Come over anytime if you change your mind, okay? We love you.”
Ilya just barely manages to hang up the phone before his tears begin to fall. He makes no effort to stem their flow, letting them soak into his hair, his blankets, his pillow. His body shakes with deep, heartwrenching sobs, and he wonders – not for the first time – how it can be possible to feel this sad, surrounded as he is by so much love.
He wonders if this is how it started for his mother.
Even when it’s at its worst, the way that it is right now, he can always manage to force himself out of bed for a game or a practice, mustering up the energy to wear the mask for as long as his job requires him to. But it’s days like today – days that no one needs or expects anything from him – that are the hardest. These are the days that he lies in bed with limbs too heavy to move, spending hours working up the energy to get himself a drink of water, crying until his body physically can’t produce any more tears and he’s left feeling like a dried up river bed, empty and hollow.
These are the days that the world around him fades until he feels like he’s standing alone on a ledge, staring into the void.
These are the days that he resents his mother the most.
Because he thinks about the way that she left him, and he thinks about doing that to Shane, about all the ways that it would break him irreparably. And it’s this, more than anything else, that always drags him out of it, down from the ledge, back into the light. Because if he can’t even live for himself some days, he can live for Shane, who would never, ever forgive him for leaving.
So why couldn’t Irina have lived for him?
The simple answer is that maybe she’d never had the support that he does; teammates that make him feel appreciated, people calling him just to check in, gentle hands to guide him off the ledge every time he finds himself there. But the other answer – the one that terrifies him to even entertain the possibility of – is that maybe, one day, it had all stopped being enough. He had stopped being enough. And the natural conclusion to this: that maybe one day everything he has now will stop being enough for him, and he will not be able to control when that day comes.
On the good days, he can convince himself that these thoughts are irrational. But on bad days – like this one – he thinks about watching both of his parents slowly fade away for different reasons, and he knows that his fate is written into his very biology in ways that there may be no escape from.
Ilya has never told anyone else – not even Shane – that he’d first learned English by reading academic papers, that even before he’d built his hockey vocabulary he’d known the meanings of things like ‘neuroplasticity’ and ‘cognitive decline’ and ‘hereditary’. That he still reads them, sometimes, spending his days off alone at home, combing the annals of medical databases and looking for any answer besides this was their life, and one day it will be yours.
He doesn’t know how to tell Shane that one day, he might have to watch Ilya fade away.
Ilya drops his phone back onto the mattress as he closes his eyes and tries to will himself back to sleep. For a while he drifts in and out of consciousness, resurfacing several hours later to a message from his coach that tomorrow’s morning’s practice has been cancelled because of the storm. He lifts his head slightly until he has a clear line of sight out his window, to see that the little daylight left before the absurdly early January sunset is already fading, the view almost completely obscured by a thick curtain of blowing snow. At least he won’t have to wake up early tomorrow to shovel himself out of the driveway. With a deep sigh he falls back into bed, closing his eyes once more.
The next time that Ilya regains consciousness happens abruptly, because it sort of sounds like someone is trying to break into his house. Except most criminals don’t typically have keys, and that’s definitely the sound of a key being turned in the lock, and–
“Ilya?”
The sound of Shane’s voice is enough to bring tears to his eyes once more.
There’s a moment of silence, and then–
“Ilya?” Shane calls again, sounding closer this time.
“Upstairs,” Ilya calls out in response, his voice hoarse from disuse.
Shane enters the room moments later, with a cardboard box balanced in one hand and a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. His eyes widen infinitesimally as he takes in the sight in front of him; Ilya’s clothes haphazardly discarded on the floor where he’d left them the night before, Ilya lying in bed with fresh tears still drying on his cheeks.
Ilya turns away before he can see the disappointment write itself across Shane’s face, fixing his gaze instead on the snow still swirling outside the window, the only light thing in the now-dark winter’s night. He waits for Shane to run, to leave, for all of this to finally be too much.
And then he feels a weight on the side of the bed and soft fingers on his cheek, brushing away his tears, gently turning his head until he’s facing Shane once more. Shane bends to brush his lips across Ilya’s once, slowly, and then pulls back just far enough for their eyes to meet. “Hey. Are you…okay?”
Ilya takes a deep breath as he prepares to fling himself across the chasm, hoping for a soft landing on the other side. “No,” he admits. It comes out like a sob, and suddenly Shane is lifting him from the mattress, pulling him into a seated position so he can cradle Ilya against his chest, rocking them both gently back and forth. He’s not sure how long they stay there, but it’s long enough for him to eventually stop trembling, for his tears to soak into the fabric of Shane’s shirt until their flow finally abates.
He thinks about the fundamental constant that underlies all the times he has cried in Shane’s arms: that Shane has never, ever been the first to let go.
“Sorry,” Ilya murmurs finally, as he pulls back.
But Shane just shakes his head, wordlessly kissing away the wetness in the corners of Ilya’s eyes. And then, ever the fixer, ever the problem-solver, he says, “Do you want to talk about it?”
“No,” Ilya responds quickly, instinctively. But then– “Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Okay.” Shane nods. “That’s okay, let’s…have you eaten today?” Ilya shakes his head wordlessly, and Shane bends to retrieve the box he’d deposited on the floor earlier, opening it to reveal a half dozen doughnuts. It’s so unexpected that Ilya almost laughs.
“Where did you get these?”
Shane shrugs, a small smile on his face. “Hintonburg, on my way through town.”
Ilya forgets, sometimes, that Shane knows this city like the back of his hand. He’s starting to realize – now that they’re able to see each other more often – that Shane knows him this way, too, that he’s been learning all of Ilya’s behaviours, cataloguing them, so that he can do things like show up out of the blue like this with the exact thing that will make Ilya feel just slightly better. He takes a doughnut from the box, and a little bit of the lead weight in his chest melts away.
“You drove all the way here in the storm.”
It’s not a question, but he knows Shane can still sense that he’s looking for some sort of an explanation. “Don’t be mad, okay?”
Ilya nods. “Okay.”
“My mom called me. She was worried about you, and she asked if there was anything I could do, and Theriault cancelled practice tomorrow so I figured…”
“So you drove all the way here,” Ilya repeats. “In the storm.”
“It wasn’t that bad, I’ve driven in worse.” For the first time since he arrived, Shane looks unsure of himself. “Do you…want me to go?”
“No,” Ilya says quickly. And then he looks down, unable to meet Shane’s eyes as he tells him, “All day I have been wishing you were here.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me?” There’s an undercurrent of hurt in Shane’s voice that feels like shards of glass, prickling at Ilya’s skin.
Because I was scared you wouldn’t come. Because I was scared that you would, and you wouldn’t like what you saw. These fears that had threatened to paralyze him seem stupid in retrospect, now that Shane is here in front of him.
Ilya is no stranger to being needed. Needed by his family, even when they’d hated him. Needed by his teammates, first in Boston, now in Ottawa. Needed by Shane in a way that still feels like a revelation to him, because the way that Shane needs him has nothing to do with what he can provide and everything to do with who he is. But he’s realizing now, or has been, maybe, for a while, that he has no idea how to let himself need someone else.
Because the only other person he has ever needed in his life is gone, and there’s no way to get her back.
Shane’s hand is on the side of his face again, forcing him to look up, and his eyes – when Ilya finally meets them with his own – are as earnest and sincere as they have ever been. “Do you remember what you said to me, that night you drove all the way up from Boston?”
I will always come, if you need me.
He remembers, because he’ll always remember. Because that night – like so many others – is branded vividly into his mind in a way he desperately hopes will endure even the strongest tests of time. But Ilya has always been the impulsive one, the one who will make the drive from Boston to Montreal in the middle of the night, the one to act first and think later – sometimes to his detriment. Shane, on the other hand, has always been the meticulous planner, slotting his Ottawa trips into his calendar between games and practices, absolutely not the one to show up unannounced after driving through the worst storm of the winter. So the fact that he’s here, now, at Ilya’s side–
“I love you,” Shane says simply, like this explains everything, like the act of being here is as easy as breathing for him, and not some kind of miracle. Like the thought of doing anything besides going to the ends of the earth for those he loves has never even occurred to him. And maybe it hasn’t.
There’s a thousand things Ilya wants to say, but when he opens his mouth, the only word that falls out is, “Why?”.
This catches Shane off guard, and he freezes, blinking in surprise. “What do you mean, why?”
“I keep waiting,” Ilya says quietly, “for you to realize I am not worth it.”
“Ilya.” It’s a soft, choked sound, and Shane’s eyes are glassy now, the same way they were when he’d sat across the couch from Ilya at the cottage – back when they’d still been balancing on the precipice of everything they’ve since become – and offered him one last out. Do you want that problem to go away?
And despite all of Shane’s assurances that he’s serious about this – waking up in the middle of the night to detail a ten year plan for them to be together, sitting in front of his parents and telling them he’s only ever been in love with one person, slotting Ilya into his life in so many ways that feel overwhelmingly permanent – Ilya still can’t help but wonder if Shane would take an out, if he offered one.
They sit there for a moment, inhabiting the landscape of things they still haven’t said, Shane’s fingers playing idly with Ilya’s hair until finally – in another fit of practicality – he asks Ilya, “Do you think you can shower?”
Ilya grunts non-committally in response.
“You don’t have to,” Shane says quickly. “Not unless you want. I just…I think maybe you’ll feel better.”
He knows Shane is right, and so Ilya takes the hand that Shane holds out, allowing himself to be pulled to his feet and led into the bathroom.
Shane undresses Ilya, and then himself, and they step into the shower together. The water feels like it’s warming him up from the inside, slowly bringing him back to life, and Ilya allows his eyes to drift shut as Shane massages shampoo into his hair, thinking about the way he’d done the same thing for Shane in a hotel room in Moscow, about all the similarities in the ways they’ve put each other back together over the years. And then Shane drops to his knees and takes Ilya in his mouth and for a while Ilya stops thinking altogether and just allows the water to wash away all of his fear and his shame until – for a brief, beautiful moment – his existence is full of nothing but an overwhelming, all-consuming love.
“Are you hungry?” Shane asks once they’ve dried off. “I can make something, if–”
“No,” Ilya interrupts softly. “I am okay.”
“Okay.” There’s a hesitation in Shane’s tone, one that indicates that he’s steeling himself to ask something. And sure enough– “Do you…want to talk about it?”
“No,” Ilya says again, because it’s the truth. “But is probably a good idea, yes.”
They settle back into bed, Ilya with his head pillowed on Shane’s lap, the position strategically chosen because he needs to be as close to Shane as possible and yet can’t bear to look him in the eyes as he says all the things he’s been holding back.
Shane says nothing while Ilya fights an internal battle, working up the courage to break the silence. It’s an all too familiar feeling, this balancing on the edge of something, scared to take a step in any direction lest he tumble headfirst into the abyss and find nothing there to break his fall.
And there are things – all the ways in which he’s realizing he is his mother’s son – that he can’t share yet, not when the wounds are as fresh as they are. But Shane has come all the way here when Ilya had needed him so badly he hadn’t even known how to ask for it, and so Ilya feels that he owes him a part of the truth, at least.
He closes his eyes, losing himself for a moment in the feeling of Shane’s fingers combing gently through his hair, and then he says, “There is something you should know.”
During his early years in Boston, Ilya had memorized phrases in English, rehearsing them in his head so he could spit them out in front of the press and look like slightly less of an idiot next to the league’s golden boys who had all spent their formative years playing juniors in Canada and giving flawless bilingual interviews. Get pucks in deep. Intercept passes. Control the neutral zone. Be more aggressive on the forecheck. The words had begun to roll off his tongue almost naturally, over the years. His English is far better now than it had been during his rookie season, but there are still moments – like right now – that make him wish there was some sort of mental script he could draw on for this, as well.
“I don’t know the right words for it,” he admits.
“It’s okay,” Shane whispers, his fingers working a gentle rhythm against Ilya’s scalp. “You don’t have to tell me anything, if–”
“No,” Ilya interrupts, before Shane can give him the out, because he knows he’s enough of a coward to take it. And then, because it’s now or it’s never, and because there will never be a perfect way to say it, he tells Shane, “I’m scared I am like my father.”
“You’re nothing like your father, Ilya.” There’s a righteous anger in Shane’s voice that feels tantamount to a warm embrace, with the way it washes over Ilya like a wave. And Shane is misunderstanding him, of course, and he’s right – Ilya is not like his father in the ways Shane is imagining – but Shane, who is the product of nurture, does not understand the indiscriminate manners of nature in all the ways that Ilya has come to.
“Not like that,” Ilya agrees, and then he takes a deep breath, preparing himself for the hard part. “More like…is genetic. What happened to him might also happen to me. Maybe I cannot stop it.” Shane’s fingers go still in his hair, and Ilya cuts himself off with a choked sob. “Sorry.”
Shane’s voice, when he finally speaks, is impossibly soft. “I always wondered how you knew that word.”
“Is not fair.” The words are spilling out of him like a flood, now that Ilya has broken the dam. “Is not fair to ask you to stay. To watch me…fade. Is…” he chokes, swallowing back another sob. “Is too much.”
“Hey.” Shane’s fingers are on his face, brushing away his tears once more. And then Shane is moving underneath him, stretching himself out on the bed until he’s mirroring Ilya’s position and the two of them are lying face to face, looking directly into Ilya’s eyes as he says, “You don’t get to make that decision for me.”
And Ilya shatters.
He takes a moment to marvel, in a detached way, at the fact that his body – dry and hollow and wrung out as it is – is still capable of producing tears. And then Shane is rolling slowly until the entire weight of his body is pressing Ilya into the mattress, the same way that Ilya has done for him on countless occasions, whenever he’s feeling overwhelmed. It’s another phrase in the unspoken dialect they’ve inadvertently created over the years, one that says I will hide you from the world until you are ready to face it, and as Ilya buries his face in the space between Shane’s head and his shoulder, breathing him in, he finally allows himself to believe that he won’t run away.
There’s a word they’ve been dancing around ever since that first summer together at the cottage, one that echoes over and over again in moments like this where they drop everything and run to each other. And Ilya has always been the first one to give a name to the things between them but this is different, this is finite in a way that even Shane’s hypothetical ten year plans had never been.
“We’re forever, Ilya,” Shane tells him, like it doesn’t take him all the courage he possesses and some borrowed to say that word, and Ilya pulls Shane even tighter towards him, and he could merge their very souls together and it would still be just shy of enough.
“I love you,” Ilya whispers, and it’s choked with emotion just like it had been the first time he’d said it, and it’s not enough – will never be enough – but he repeats it over and over again all the same. I love you. I love you. I love you.
The next time Ilya wakes, it’s morning, and he’s lying in the circle of Shane’s arms. There’s a sheen of frost covering the window, spiderwebbing into intricate swirls and patterns, like a thousand tiny snowflakes all frozen together. The early morning light refracts as it shines through, dancing throughout the room, painting rainbows of light across the walls and the ceiling and Shane’s face, when Ilya turns to look at him.
Shane is already awake, watching him with soft eyes, and Ilya remembers his words from the night before, tries to think about what the path to forever looks like, imagines a life where they can wake up in each others’ arms like this every morning. A life where he doesn’t have to watch Shane leaving and taking with him this temporary brightness he’s shone into the darkness that Ilya always feels himself slipping into, when he’s alone.
“Hey.” Shane brushes gentle fingers across his cheek. “You look sad. Are you okay?”
Courage buoyed by the morning light, Ilya decides to offer Shane another small piece of the truth. “I get sad sometimes. Is…maybe I can’t stop it.”
“I’m sorry,” Shane says softly.
Ilya shakes his head feeling like he’s been punched in the stomach, like a key is turning in his heart to unlock a long-repressed memory, and he gives voice to the same words he wishes someone had said to him, all those years ago. “Is not your fault.”
He knows, now, that he couldn’t have saved his mother, but this knowledge will never undo half a lifetime of feeling like he just hadn’t been enough. “Is not your fault,” he says again, with his whole heart, and he feels Shane nod against his shoulder and Ilya is overwhelmingly grateful – and not for the first time – for Shane’s ability to take things like this at face value.
“Is it…anything specific?”
It’s everything, all at once. It’s being alone in a new city for the first time in a decade, but this time without the energy to try to integrate himself into his new team the way he had as a rookie. It’s the media circus surrounding his move to Ottawa that still hasn’t died down despite the fact that it’s been over half a season, reporters asking about his motivations ad nauseum after every single game no matter how often he shuts their questions down with non-answers. It’s the way he knows they’re talking about him back in Boston, the speculation that he couldn’t handle the pressure, that he’s having a mental breakdown. It’s wondering if maybe they’re not entirely wrong.
It’s the fear that one day he’ll slip into a darkness he can’t claw his way out of.
He wants to crack his heart open and lead Shane through the wreckage, wants Shane’s hands to be the ones that rebuild him, piece by fractured piece, until there’s no part left of him that Shane hasn’t touched. He wants to lie here forever, he wants to never leave the security of Shane’s arms, he wants a thousand other impossible things that he knows it’s unfair to ask for.
We’re making it work, Shane had told him a month into the season, and Ilya had nodded silently in agreement as if it were natural for making it work to feel like his heart was constantly tearing itself in two, natural for an all-consuming darkness to overtake him every time he watched Shane drive away. He remembers thinking about the future, the ten years – maybe more – standing between them and retirement, and desperately trying to glimpse the light at the end of the long, dark tunnel.
It’s been half a season since then, and he still can’t see it, and sometimes he wonders if he ever will.
He wants to tell Shane that his arms are the closest thing he has to a home, that Ilya needs him more than he’s ever needed anything in his life in a way that absolutely terrifies him, that he’s scared of who he feels himself becoming every time he’s left to navigate this darkness on his own.
And yet there’s still, despite everything, a part of him – the part that was scolded for his tears as a child until he’d learned to hide them behind an impenetrable wall – that wonders if maybe he just feels too deeply, if the weight of all this is too much for Shane to carry. He thinks back to the early days of their relationship – far before they’d ever thought of it as that – about all the subtle failures in their small attempts to open up to each other over the years; freezing, shutting down, running away whenever anything risked getting too real. They’ve carried this with them throughout the years, despite all their best efforts, letting it bleed into what they are now, and sometimes Ilya wonders if he won’t spend the rest of his life engaged in a desperate war with the part of his brain that tells him Shane will leave one day, because that’s what people do.
And yet…
And yet, Shane is still looking at him with a kind of expectant hope that Ilya will tell him the problem so he can start brainstorming solutions, and Ilya isn’t sure how to tell him that this might not be something you fix.
“You know you can tell me anything, right?”
It’s an echo of the first time they’d ever spoken on the phone, the day Ilya had called Shane mere hours after watching them prepare his father’s death certificate, thinking – in a detached way – about how both the beginning and end of a life are marked by paperwork, of all things. And back then, just like he does now, Ilya had craved a distraction far more than he’d craved giving voice to all the complicated emotions inside him, pulling on their tangled threads until they worked themselves into some semblance of a tapestry. He knows there are things festering under the surface, knows he can’t leave them there forever, but the deep exhaustion from the night before is still infiltrating the very marrow of his bones and he needs to let himself exist in this relative peace for as long as he can have it.
So instead he just tells Shane, “I know,” and he tries to let himself believe it.
They eventually make their way out of bed and down the stairs. The entire house is full of a sparkling light as the late morning sun – intensified by the snow drifts pressing up against windows and doors – refracts through the windows, leaving bursts of light in its wake. It’s like the fabric of the universe itself is trying to pull Ilya out of the void, to show him that this kind of interminable beauty can exist even in the cold, dark winter of his soul. He feels lighter, somehow, even if not necessarily better, like a bit of the crushing weight he’s spent the past month living under has been lifted just slightly.
“I always loved days like this as a kid,” Shane tells him, staring wistfully out the window, and Ilya tries to reconcile this with the Shane that he knows – full of a steely determination that borders, at times, on self-destruction – and he wonders if maybe they’re both afraid of slowing down, for different reasons.
“Do you have to go?” Ilya asks, in a way that he knows sounds like stay, please, and Shane smiles softly as he shakes his head.
“I think it’ll be a while before the roads are clear.” And there’s something unspoken in it, an I’ll stay as long as you need me that neither of them acknowledge, because they don’t need to.
And as they clear the snow off of Shane’s car later, and Ilya allows the breaths of cold winter air to revitalize him, filling him with something he hasn’t even realized he’s been missing, he tries desperately to allow himself to believe in forever.