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“Tell me you think I’m brave,” Shane asked out of the blue as they lazed in bed, still riding the high of winning the cup together.
Ilya felt sure he had to have misunderstood Shane, mistranslated the request somehow. It didn’t make any sense for Shane to ask such a thing in the current moment. But as Shane stared up at Ilya from where he’d propped his chin on Ilya’s chest, Ilya could tell he hadn’t misunderstood. Shane’s eyes had that slight worried crinkle in the corners that appeared whenever he needed reassurance about something.
“Of course I think you’re brave, Воробейчик,” Ilya promised. “You are the bravest person I know. Why do you need to hear that right now? Is everything okay?”
Was this maybe lingering anxiety over what had happened with the Metros, the end of the season bringing all of that back up even though it was the best end to the season they could’ve imagined? Ilya knew what had happened there did still bother Shane, that facing them on the ice throughout the season hadn’t lessened that weight as much as Ilya had hoped. Shane had loved that team, become a professional player with them. One season wasn’t going to be enough to fix how much they’d hurt him with their rejection.
Shane kissed his chest, the gesture slowing Ilya’s heart somewhat. It didn’t seem like Shane was upset-anxious. More…nervous-anxious. But that was just confusing in a different way, because what the hell did he have to be nervous about around Ilya of all people?
“Yeah,” Shane assured. “I just…I’ve been working on something since the start of the season. A surprise for you. A secret. And it’s done, but…” He trailed off with a shrug.
This was a lot of directions for Ilya’s still tired mind to be going down in the span of several minutes while in a post cup-winning and post twenty-four hours of wild sex haze. If Shane threw him one more abrupt emotional shift, Ilya was going to have to pin him down and fuck him again to get a mental break. Not that he didn’t plan on doing that eventually anyway, but still.
Ilya’s cupped Shane’s cheek, gently pulling him up for a kiss. “You are very brave. And now I am very curious. Please show me?”
Shane melted into the command, forcing a smile out of Ilya. Always so good. How had Ilya gotten so damn lucky?
“Okay,” Shane said. “Wait here, I’ll be right back.”
Watching Shane try to get out of bed without the clingy little cat Ilya had adopted for him several months earlier staying attached was hilarious. Most days, Puck managed to seem more determined to live inside Shane’s skin than Ilya did, and that was a feat. He’d taken to riding around the house on Shane’s shoulders like a scarf. A scarf that liked to swat at Ilya whenever possible. Ilya adored the cat, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t also slightly at war with him on any given day.
Puck finally relinquished his hold on the comforter and flopped onto the bed with a plaintive meow as Shane left. Ilya sat up, trying not to disturb a slumbering Anya at the end of the bed. Puck looked between Ilya’s lap and the bedroom door after Shane a couple times, then slunk into Ilya’s lap, turning into a puddle of black fur.
“Oh, we are friends today?” Ilya said, scratching Puck’s belly. Puck started to purr, seeming to confirm he was calling a truce for now.
Anya, ever able to sense when Ilya was giving Puck attention instead of her, crawled up the bed and shoved her head in next to Puck, who didn’t seem to mind. Ilya pet them both as he waited for Shane to come back, glad to have something to do with his hands while he waited. He truly had no idea what was about to happen, trying to think back over the season to get any ideas and coming up blank. Shane had said he’d been “working on” something, and he’d clearly gone to get something, so had he…made…something? Ilya had never seen Shane make anything outside of the kitchen, and food hardly made sense for whatever was going on.
Shane had started keeping a bullet journal this season, but Ilya didn’t really see that as making something exactly. It seemed more like a way for Shane to get a better grasp on all the thoughts that constantly competed for attention inside his head by getting them out of his head and into a physical form. He always seemed calmer after working on the journal. It was like therapy for him, in a way, or at least that was how Ilya thought about it.
Shane finally reappeared carrying two boxes, one much smaller than the other. Both were silvery and the smaller one on top had a palm-sized red bow affixed in the center. He set them on the bed in front of Ilya, keeping a hand on them to stop Ilya reaching for them yet as he sat down and settled on the other side.
“Do you remember last year when we were picking frames for the paintings, and you said you’d hang more photos around the house if we had them?” Shane asked.
Ilya nodded. “Yes, but it is fine. We had to be careful, and we take plenty of photos now.”
Shane shook his head. “It isn’t fine, though. We’re not going to rehash that argument, it is what it is, but it isn’t fine. I hate that we don’t have more photos from almost a decade of our lives together. I’ve wanted to fix it for a long time, but I didn’t really think that was possible. I thought about commissioning someone to paint some of the moments I wish we’d photographed, but that felt too…impersonal, I guess. So I, well, did something else. Did this.” He lifted his hand and nudged the smaller box towards Ilya.
Ilya wanted to reach across the boxes and pull Shane in for a kiss, but Shane was the sort of nervous now that wouldn’t easily accept the kiss. The only thing that would fix it would be for Ilya to open the boxes and figure this all out, so he removed the first lid. Something about the action grabbed Puck’s attention and he lifted his head, eyes zeroing in on the bow, pupils going wide with mischief. He pounced on the bow, ripped it free, and sped out of the room in a flash, Anya on his heels.
“We will not see that again until we move,” Ilya snickered.
“Probably not even then,” Shane agreed. The nerves in his tone were still there, and he started doing his little nervous tic of rubbing his thumbs back and forth over the tips of his fingers.
Ilya didn’t comment, just turned his attention back to the box. Inside was a simple looking black spiral notebook, the hard cover slightly textured.
“I still can’t quite believe I pulled this off,” Shane mumbled. “So I wanted to kind of…prove to you that I did, I guess? Prove to myself that I did it. That’s what the sketchbook is.”
Sketchbook? Ilya knew that word, or he thought he did thanks to Haas, but he did not think it made sense in this context. Shane did not sketch. He doodled, now, but only in service of things he wrote in his journal. Never just sketches the way Haas did.
Flipping open the cover, Ilya started to thumb through the pages, unable to stop his jaw from dropping as he went. What started as simple swatches of color turned to sketches of photos that had been taped to the top of each page turned to…him. His own face stared out of the paper dozens of times, along with a few of Shane himself and some of other people including Yuna and David, and other members of the Centaurs. There were photos next to each drawing, a grid sketched over them. By the end of the book the drawings were almost photographs themselves, the gridlines Shane had been using as guides completely invisible on the final pages.
Across from him Shane was squirming with his whole body now, not just his hands, and blushing bright red all the way to his ears. Ilya knew he had to say something, but it took what felt like ages before he managed to pull up even a few words.“You did these? All of these?”
Shane only managed a small nod.
“Did Haas teach you?” Ilya tried to think of times they’d been alone together long enough for anything like that to have happened, but he came up blank.
Shane shook his head.
Ilya wanted to flip through the sketchbook again, slowly, drink in every detail of every single page. But the bigger box was still there and unopened. If something as astonishing as this sketchbook was what the smaller box contained, what the fuck was in the big one? Heart racing, he set the sketchbook carefully back in its place, then lifted the lid of the second box. Tissue paper covered whatever was inside, so he pulled that away too, only for the ground to drop out from under him.
Once more, his own face was staring up at him, and so was Shane’s, except this time they were both seventeen and standing in that parking lot where they’d first met. Ilya had felt like such an idiot in that moment, barely understanding half of what the excited Canadian with cute freckles was saying to him, but that wasn’t how this drawing had captured him. It had brought out the excitement under the lack of understanding, because Ilya had been watching Shane too back then. It had been hard not to, the media already pitting them against one another. For the first time in a long time, Ilya had felt like he might finally have some competition on the ice. Someone to challenge him, make the game fun again in a way it hadn’t been since he’d lost his mom barely five years earlier. Shane had captured that feeling and held it in his memory for a fucking decade despite, at the time, not having known a single thought that had been going through Ilya’s head on that day.
Shane had drawn this. Shane. He’d taken something Ilya had believed would only be a memory, one subject to the dangerously nebulous future of the inside of his own head, and cemented it in reality forever. Given Ilya something solid to look at and hold and savor no matter what happened.
“Shane—” Ilya choked, a million different feelings roiling inside his body as tears gathered in the corners of his eyes. “You did this?”
Shane nodded, nerves still clear on his face and in his posture. Ilya tried to come up with something to say, but he was too distracted by the fact there was clearly more to be found in the box. He had to know what else was there. Lifting out the first frame, he put it on Shane’s pillow, making very sure it was not going to slide off before turning back to the box and pulling away the next layer of tissue paper.
A sunset greeted him this time, framed between he and Shane’s backs as they sat on a beech in Florida.
“That was my favorite game I had ever played until you joined the Centaurs,” Ilya murmured.
It was the first time they’d ever played together, yes, but it was also when their relationship had, for all intents and purposes, restarted. It was when Ilya had learned that Shane and Rose had never been all that serious, that they’d broken up, not gotten secretly engaged like Ilya feared. He’d known the fear was ridiculous even then—Shane and Rose hadn’t been together more than a few months—but he still hadn’t been able to shake it. Then Shane had told him they weren’t together and it felt like all the lights turned back on in Ilya’s world. Every one of those lights seemed to be captured in that sunset.
Ilya set that drawing aside on another pillow as carefully as the first, heart continuing to race as he revealed the third. Once more it featured the two of them, this time surrounded by the soaring trees around Shane’s cottage as they kicked a soccer ball in the backyard. Even though they were much smaller in this one, the joy on their faces was still clear, and exactly how Ilya had felt in that moment. Elated to be spending so much time with Shane, entranced by seeing him so relaxed and unburdened. Stupidly and, at that point, secretly in love.
“Holy shit,” Ilya breathed, picking it up to look closer at all the details. “Shane this is…Охуенно.”
Shane had done this. His Shane. His analytical, meticulous Shane who had never before shown the slightest inclination towards art had carefully colored every single leaf, every shadow and shine, every curve of their bodies until the only thing that gave it all away as a drawing rather than a photo was the soft, subtle texture of pencil marks. Ilya still couldn’t figure out how, figure out when, even after having flipped through the sketchbook and seen Shane’s progression.
Putting the third one down was hard, Ilya wanted to stare at it forever, but there was one more in the box. He was stopped from revealing it, however, by Shane holding his hand out over it.
“This last one is…umm…just for us,” Shane said, the blush that had started to fade coming back full force. “You can hang it, but only in here. Or our bedroom at the cottage.”
Ilya’s skin felt like it was buzzing just as much as when they’d won the cup. Maybe even more. He batted Shane’s hand away, removing the last layer of paper just as quickly to reveal the last framed drawing. The world didn’t drop out from under him this time, it just fucking stopped. Because this one, this one was the first time they’d both said they loved one another, the first time Ilya had ever said it to Shane in English. He hadn’t meant to, had regretted when it slipped out, so sure for some reason that Shane was going go push him away, tell him it wasn’t like that, that Ilya had misread things and maybe he should just go home. But Shane hadn’t done that. He’d stared at Ilya in awe, echoing the sentiment back before tugging Ilya down on top of him and holding him tight, kissing his head and saying it over and over again while Ilya shook with the emotional release. The drawing captured that first moment after Shane had said it back, the overwhelmed relief and love on both their faces.
“Shane—” Ilya choked out again, looking up at Shane with a few tears finally breaking free to roll down his face.
“I know they aren’t photos,” Shane mumbled. “But—”
Oh Ilya was not having that. He immediately grabbed the box, the last drawing still inside, moved it out of the way, and launched himself at his husband, crawling into Shane’s lap and grabbing his face. He kissed every single piece of skin not under his hands, then moved his hands around to tangle in Shane’s hair so he could kiss the previously covered pieces too. “No buts. Shane Rozanov-Hollander you are fucking amazing. Oh my god I love you so much. These are—are— God, I don’t even know good enough English word. Or Russian. Fuck. They are better than photos. So much better.”
Ilya still had so many questions, so much he didn’t understand about how Shane had done this, but for right now the only thing that mattered was making sure Shane knew exactly how amazing he was. Even as Shane tried to wiggle away from Ilya’s extreme attention and continued praise, Ilya didn’t let him, just kept going, using every word in English and Russian that captured even a tiny fraction of how he felt about what Shane had done. The only thing that kept him from ripping Shane’s clothes off right then to make sure Shane really got it was the fact the drawings were still on the bed too.
“When?” Ilya finally asked between kisses.
Shane looked a little dazed, blinking a few times like even the single word was too much for him to process. “What?”
Ilya gestured at the drawings scattered over the other half of the bed. “When did you do this? So much work, so much practice, how did you hide so well?”
Shane blinked a couple more times. “Oh. Um. Your captain’s meetings. Your solo sponsorship stuff. When you slept in. When you took Anya on long walks. Middle of the night sometimes. And I started keeping the journal so I could practice a little in front of you too.”
“Удивительный,” Ilya breathed, diving in for another round of kisses. “And you learned all of this in one season of sneaking practice? Ты невероятен.”
Shane’s only answer was a pleased hum and an attempt to chase Ilya’s lips with his own. Ilya wasn’t even sure if Shane was hearing him at this point, but an idea had popped into his head that he needed Shane to hear so, reluctantly, he extracted himself from Shane and stepped off the bed. His husband pouted adorably, but stayed put when Ilya placed a gentle hand on the center of his chest. As a reward, Ilya kissed his forehead. Then, very carefully, he packed the other drawings back into the box and moved it, and the sketchbook, to the dresser. By the time he was done, they’d both caught their breath a little, and the haze had lifted from Shane’s eyes somewhat.
Ilya tried to piece together what he’d seen in the sketchbook with what he wanted to say, once again fighting the urge to go flip back through every page. There’d be time for that later. “So you take photos, and put a grid on them, and then…draw the grid one square at a time?”
Shane nodded. “I’ve tried to do it the way Haas does, freehand sketching, but it always comes out terrible. This way it’s…almost like color by numbers?”
“But we have no photos of those moments?” Ilya said, gesturing to the box. He was still stood a good five feet away from Shane, well aware that if he got closer they’d go right back to making out.
“No, but we have photos of all the pieces,” Shane said. “I learned a little Photoshop too, spliced things together to make my references. Honestly, the hardest part was finding a good photo of you when you were seventeen. I had to ask Svetlana, actually. Bought her silence with a fancy dinner when we were in Boston and you went out with Marlow. Didn’t tell her what I wanted it for, though.”
Ilya couldn’t help but laugh. “Not only are you artist now, you are spy too, hmm? Secret meetings, hidden practice, sneaky journal.”
Shane leaned back on his hands, cocky grin spreading across his face. “I guess so.”
“Very impressive. Very sexy.”
“Not sexy enough to get you back on this bed, apparently,” Shane shot back.
“I will be there soon,” Ilya promised. “I am trying to have conversation without you passing out from lust in the middle.”
Shane rolled his eyes.
“Fine, I will hurry up, my impatient Воробейчик.”
“Finally.”
Ilya blindly reached into the dresser behind him and pulled out a pair of balled up socks to throw at him. “You say you cannot draw without your photos and grids, right?”
Shane chucked the socks back, smacking Ilya in the shoulder despite his attempt to dodge. “Right.”
The answer was a little disappointing, but Ilya could still work with it. He gestured to the big box again. “How long does one of these take you?”
Shane shrugged. “Total hours? Maybe…thirty to eighty? That includes making the references and stuff. The one of us playing soccer took the longest, with all the plants.”
“How long did the one of us in bed take?”
Shane swallowed, shivering under the heated gaze Ilya had leveled at him. “Um. Maybe…maybe forty? I did it last, and I was getting faster by then.”
“So.” Ilya sauntered closer finally, standing next to the bed but not touching Shane, who made an adorable annoyed whine at that. He didn’t reach for Ilya either, though, knowing this had turned into a game of permission and he didn’t have it yet. “If you were to take a photo of me right now, go downstairs to your office and print it out, we would have forty whole hours of you sitting at the end of this bed, staring at me while you show me exactly how you did all of this?”
This time it wasn’t a shiver that ran through Shane’s body, it was full on shudder that dropped his eyes half closed. “Fuck. I— Um— Fuck. I don’t— I don’t know if I could—could focus enough.”
Ilya hummed. “I think you could. You are very competent. Very skilled. And I promise you, the reward when you finish will be worth it.”
Shane fell back on the bed, taking several large gulps of air. “You do realize, it’s not forty hours all at once, right? It was more like forty hours spread out over a few weeks.”
Ilya shrugged, enjoying the effect this was having on Shane. “Yes. Do not worry, I will not make you wait until very end for sex. Take as long as you need to do art well, but you must let me watch every single second to get your reward.”
Shane eyed him, still sprawled out. “I’ve never…drawn in front of anyone before.”
Ilya tilted his head. “Not even Haas? I know you said he did not teach you, but I thought maybe you had still talked about it.”
“Talked, yes,” Shane said. “He’s kind of the one who gave me the idea, back at Bood’s last barbecue before the season started. And I asked him for advice a few times on things like materials, or general tips, but I never worked around him.”
“You should,” Ilya said. “I think he would like it. I think you would too. You can be quiet little artists in corner together whenever world is too loud.”
Shane huffed but smiled. “Yeah, maybe.”
“You do not have to draw me while I watch if you do not want to, Shane,” Ilya conceded. “Was just silly idea.”
Shane shook his head, sitting back up and reaching for Ilya, scooting to the edge of the bed as he pulled Ilya in until Ilya was between his legs, his arms wrapped around Ilya’s waist and lips pressed to Ilya’s bare stomach. “I want to, actually. Just…it’s going to take me a while to…settle into it, I think.”
Ilya pet his hair with one hand and rubbed his back with the other. “Of course. I will not rush you.”
Shane nuzzled closer, eyes dropping shut.
Ilya couldn’t resist what he said next, hoping he was getting the line right. He’d only see the movie once in English, and the Russian dub his mother loved probably hadn’t been the best translation. Pulling back from Shane, he grabbed his chin and tilted it up towards his own face, wanting to be sure he saw Shane’s exact expression.
“Draw me like one of your French girls.”
Shane made something between a cough, a splutter, and a laugh, yanking Ilya down onto the bed and kissing him between more laughs. “Since when do you know that cheesy movie well enough to quote it?”
“Is not cheesy!” Ilya defended with a laugh of his own. “Is—is bittersweet!”
“Oh yeah?” Shane said, amusement still on his face.
Ilya nodded. “Was my mother’s favorite, actually. She thought Jack was very cute. And she liked that older woman, what was her name, the one who is friends with Rose?”
Shane’s expression had melted into something much softer. “Molly Brown. The Unsinkable Molly Brown.”
“Yes, her,” Ilya said. “Mama and I would watch the movie together on the anniversary of when it sunk. We would make big bowls of popcorn and candy, sneak into my father’s den to use his big TV.”
“Maybe we can go to the Titanic exhibit in Nova Scotia this summer,” Shane offered. “Or the Molly Brown museum next time we play in Denver.”
“Both,” Ilya decided. He didn’t have any particular interest in the Titanic himself, but both things sounded like something his mother would have loved, so that was reason enough to do them. “Now—” Ilya grabbed Shane and rolled them so he was on top. “Get. Camera.”
——
Shane was apparently not only an artist, he was a picky artist, demanding they wait until the sun was setting so “the lighting was right.” That did mean waiting the whole day, however, and Ilya was not even willing to try lasting that long without fucking Shane again. So he did. Twice. It would have been three times, but they were interrupted by forgotten lunch plans with Shane’s parents who—thankfully—were very studious about both texting first and knocking.
“There’s my champions!” Yuna said, throwing her arms wide and enveloping both of them in a hug before even setting her purse down.
“Good job, again, boys,” David said, joining the hug as well.
“Thanks,” they both said.
And then Yuna was off to the races about sponsorships and interviews and the summer camps, hardly stopping to breathe between sentences, Shane trailing after her and nodding along. Ilya and David shared an amused, knowing look. Neither of them were likely to get a word in for at least an hour.
Puck strutted by suddenly, high stepping like a show horse, the red bow (which was bigger than his head) still clutched in his teeth.
“I see someone else has found himself a trophy,” David laughed.
Ilya whipped out his phone to take a video before Puck vanished. “Yes, it came off present Shane gave me this morning. I do not think he has put it down since.”
Speaking of that present…
Ilya went after Shane where he had vanished into the kitchen with Yuna. Both now had mugs of coffee in hand, and were talking as animatedly as before. Ilya stepped between them facing Shane, and kissed him to make totally sure he had his attention.
“What—”
“Can I show them what you have been up to?” Ilya interrupted Shane’s slightly scolding tone.
“Oh.” Shane blushed. Not as much as he had been earlier, but still pretty heavily. “Yeah, yeah you can. Just the, um…”
“Yes, I know,” Ilya assured. He’d take out the private one before bringing the box down.
Shane gave a nod of permission and Ilya bounded gleefully away towards the stairs.
“What is happening?” Yuna said as he left.
“I…uh…did something for him that I’ve been keeping secret all season. Made something for him. He’s very excited about it,” Shane told her. Ilya couldn’t see him, but he knew Shane was still blushing, probably rubbing the back of his neck.
Ilya carefully removed the “I love you” drawing, then put the other three back in the box and brought it to the kitchen, setting it on the breakfast table. Shane looked like he wanted the floor to open up and swallow him, but not so much that Ilya felt the need to stop. Shane would learn to accept praise eventually if it was the last thing Ilya did.
“Your beautiful, amazing, talented son decided to fix the fact that we do not have photos from most of our relationship,” Ilya explained. Shane groaned and tilted his head back, eyes closed. “So he taught himself whole new amazing skill in just one season, and kept it all secret from me until this morning.”
Yuna and David both looked deeply confused, eyes going between Ilya and Shane. Ilya, grinning so hard it hurt, carefully pulled out all three frames and arranged them on the table in the order they occurred in, then stepped back and waved a hand over them for David and Yuna to come and look. They did, eyes going wide.
“Shane, you did these?” David said, looking back to his son with just as much awe on his face as Ilya felt.
“Um. Yeah.” Shane’s arms were crossed tightly over his chest now, so Ilya went over and wrapped him in a hug, kissing his cheek and nuzzling at his neck until he felt Shane relax against him.
“Shane, honey, these are…are beautiful,” Yuna said. “I never thought you knew anything about art.”
There was something in Yuna’s tone that reminded Ilya of the day Shane had come out to them, her fear that she had missed something crucial about her only child. Shane seemed to pick up on it too.
“I didn’t,” Shane assured. “I don’t even remember the last time I did something artistic before I started this project. It was just something I started thinking about after we got the paintings for our gallery wall last summer, and I decided to give it a try. But I wasn’t sure if I could actually pull it off, and if I could I wanted it to be a surprise.”
Yuna relaxed, her smile growing as she turned back to the drawings. “Only a year, huh? Less than a year, actually. Wow.”
Shane relaxed even more against Ilya, and Ilya gave him another kiss on the cheek. “Yeah. It was…fun. When I look at them, I still can’t quite believe I did it. They’re more…copying, than drawing, kind of. I stick really tightly to photos, or fake photos I make from other photos, and I use a reference grid instead of freehanding stuff. But. Yeah.”
“Art is art,” David said. “Doesn’t matter the method.”
Ilya agreed wholeheartedly. “My lovely, talented, artistic husband.”
“Alright, alright,” Shane said, squirming away. “That’s enough praise, thanks. Dad, come see the new grill Ilya got me for making it into the playoffs.”
David perked up and they both vanished out onto the porch. Yuna turned back to the drawings, looking at each in turn.
“These are so beautiful,” she whispered.
Ilya nodded, coming to stand next to her and look at them as well. “They are…beyond the sort of love I thought I would find. And I do not mean that in the way of not deserving his love. I just…did not know love like this was even possible.”
Yuna smiled, linking their arms together and resting her head on his shoulder. “There’s this blog I read on the internet years ago, about loving people to the point of invention. It was a big list of times in history where people loved someone so much, they invented things that changed the world, or just made it a little kinder for them. Things like medicine or household gadgets or clothes that were easy to put on with a disability. These drawings make me think of that.”
“I will have to find that article,” Ilya said. It sounded very sweet. The sort of thing he might like to file away in his folder of stuff to look through when his depression got bad.
“Have David or I ever told you how we met?” Yuna asked.
Ilya shook his head, curious at the seeming topic change.
“We went to college together. McGill, which you know. I was a sports reporter for the school paper. Barely two months into my freshman year I broke my leg in a skiing accident. I probably should have used a wheelchair, but the campus wasn’t accessible at all, so I was on crutches and, let me tell you, trying to navigate a Canadian college campus in winter on crutches while balancing a recorder in one hand and a notepad in the other is not a good time.” She laughed softly. “But anyways. I spent two home games struggling to even stay upright without spilling everything including myself onto the floor. Then suddenly this cute new right winger who could hardly look me in the eye comes up to me before the third game, and asks to see my crutches for a second. So I give them to him, because he’s cute, and he pulls these two contraptions out of his pockets. They were just made out of PVC pipe, and I couldn’t tell what they were, but he clipped one to each crutch, then he holds out his hand for my recorder and notepad, and clips them into the things he’d made. They held them perfectly. I could move around without anything falling out, then just reach up and turn the recorder off and on, scribble a note, and keep going. There was even a spot for my pen.”
“That is adorable,” Ilya gushed. Did Shane know this story? Ilya had to make sure Shane knew this story.
“It was the sweetest thing ever,” Yuna agreed. “They won that game, and I asked him out for coffee the second he came back to the bench.”
“We are a lucky pair, finding men like them,” Ilya told her.
She lightly squeezed his arm. “The luckiest.”