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Las Vegas, June 2014
Ilya Rozanov isn’t inherently an anxious man.
Given the nature of his career and his upbringing, and the public persona he has crafted as a result, any form of vulnerability is a weakness he can’t afford to concede. He has had years to build something sleek and impenetrable over the rougher, broken parts of him instead, something that reads, depending on who’s looking, as arrogance or magnetism or both at once. It’s the kind of armor that serves him well.
The things that can faze him are few and specific.
His father is admittedly one of them. A cold, unyielding man to please even when he was a child, Grigori Rozanov has never been the kind of father who has had anything positive to say to him. Not love, not pride, and certainly not anything that might be mistaken for either.
What he did say, however, quite often, to the point Ilya can usually time it to the very second he’s going to hear it again, is that Ilya is lazy. That he is wasting what God has given him. That talent without discipline is an embarrassment, that Ilya is an embarrassment, and that if he wants to be taken seriously, he needs to work twice as hard as he currently is.
Even as a Stanley Cup champion now, he feels rather … empty. Winning the Cup had been a real moment for him when it happened. There had been a moment when his hands had closed around it, when the noise of the arena had become something almost physical, and he had felt something pure and joyful. He was proud, and had quietly dedicated the win to his late mother, hoping she would have been proud of him if she had been alive.
But reality has a way of creeping in eventually. His father is not well. Hasn’t been well for a while if he’s being honest with himself. He knows he will have to board a plane to Moscow next week, to see him. The Dementia is progressing quickly, and clearly no one else is going to take care of him. Not his brother, not his father’s wife. Neither of them thinks anything is wrong with him.
This is all manageable. He will figure it out. He’s okay.
But then he'd walked into the backstage corridor and seen Shane Hollander, and what was once manageable had become, immediately and completely, something else. Unfortunately, no one quite affects him like Shane Hollander.
He hasn't seen Hollander since the Olympics. He hasn’t spoken to him beyond a few texts since. He thinks about how Hollander had come up to him in Sochi and asked him if he was okay, with those all-too-expressive eyes and in that soft voice that makes Ilya want to pull him close and never let go. It was too much.
Too much to receive. Too much to reciprocate. He immediately pushed him away and put months of careful, sufficient distance between them. It had felt like enough, until now, until Hollander stood twenty feet away, his freckles darker from the sun and his hair parted neatly like it always is, jaw set in that specific way it gets when Ilya is somewhere in the vicinity. And just like that, those months of careful distance had ceased to exist, and the feelings came rushing in.
Now, he is gripping the bathroom counter backstage at the NHL awards, trying to force down the panic he can feel coursing through his body, with about two-ish minutes to get his shit together before he has to stand beside Hollander, in front of twelve hundred people, playing up their rivalry even though it is the least complicated part of their dynamic.
He drops his hands from the counter and looks at himself in the mirror, taking a long breath. He finds that signature, devil-may-care look that the cameras know and love, and puts it on.
He saunters up behind Hollander. “Looking for me?”
He doesn’t admit it, but something settles in him as he takes in that familiar scowl that makes Hollander look more like an angry kitten than the formidable rival he is supposed to be.
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The evening moves the way Ilya needs it to.
They play their parts perfectly as they stand at the podium and say their scripted lines before presenting a trophy to a forward from Edmonton. Nice guy. But he doesn’t really think about that, not when he’s so close to Hollander, enough to feel the solid warmth of him and smell his cologne. Something woody and distinctly spiced.
He has two selfies in his phone of the two of them, taken cheekily on the podium, and he does not think too much about why he wants them. Even if Hollander’s face conveys a great deal of outrage in them, even if Hollander never wants to touch him again, at least he gets to keep these pictures.
After their spiel, when Hollander ducks into the same bathroom he was in not too long ago, Ilya can’t stop himself from following. Their conversation ends with Hollander looking wrecked against the bathroom sink as Ilya promises to make it worth his while, later, if he comes up to his hotel room after the party. He leaves without looking back, but not without stealing a kiss. He can feel something in him unravel at the press of Hollander’s lip against his, something monstrous that makes him want and want and want, and that’s why he leaves the way he does, before that feeling spills over into something he can’t take back.
He wins the MVP. Of course he does. He moves through the party, charming and unbothered as always. He shakes hands and smiles for the camera. He accepts congratulations with the easy grace of someone who expects nothing else. He can always tell where Hollander is, even without looking.
Ilya doesn’t look toward him. Not in a conspicuous way. Not even when he texts Hollander his room number. He just slips his phone back into his pocket like it's nothing, like his pulse isn’t racing against his chest the way it does when he takes a few laps on the ice.
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The first thing he does when he gets back to his room is shed his tuxedo jacket and bowtie, then his shoes and socks. He unbuttons the buttons on his shirt, and smooths a hand over his slicked-back hair, taming any curls that may have escaped from the careful style he has maintained all evening. He pours himself a glass of vodka, the good kind that most hotels don’t carry, hoping that the alcohol will help offset his nerves.
Jane: I’m here.
Lily: Door is unlocked
Hollander walks in a moment later. His jacket is still on, his bowtie untied but still around his neck, his cheeks carrying the faintest flush that could be the alcohol or something else entirely. He looks perfect.
Ilya spreads his arms, waiting.
There is a brief pause, before Hollander gives him a small, conceding smile and says, "Congratulations."
"Thank you," Ilya says, keeping his voice level, hoping that he comes across as unbothered and satisfied. "Now take off your clothes."
“You’re such an asshole,” Hollander says with a chuckle, but does what he is asked anyway. Always such a good listener. Ilya wonders if Hollander realizes just how obedient he is for him.
When Ilya instructs Hollander to get on the bed while he sits on the chair he positioned at the foot of the bed, he tells himself it is the right choice.
From here, he can watch Hollander from across the room, without the wanting tipping into something he has to account for afterward. He can have Shane Hollander with something that reads as idle satisfaction, rather than the white-knuckled restraint it actually is.
He shouldn’t want Shane Hollander beyond what they’ve been doing all these years.
“Touch yourself,” Ilya says.
Shane’s expression shifts into something open and unguarded and hungry, something Hollander doesn't let people see very often, something Ilya suspects he doesn't let anyone else see at all.
There you are, Ilya thinks as he grips his glass of vodka tighter.
But as it turns out, he cannot look at Shane Hollander spread out across his bed in the low light, touching himself in a way that makes Ilya’s throat feel dry and his eyes darken with lust and something deeper, and feel nothing. He has never been able to do that. He's simply gotten very good at pretending.
Maybe he shouldn’t have invited him up here at all.
He crosses the room eventually, because there was never a real question of whether he would, only ever a question of when. Hollander looks up at him with dark, blown-out eyes, Ilya thinks, Why does it have to be you? Why are you so perfect? It’s fucking awful.
He doesn't kiss him. This is the one thing he holds onto, the one line he doesn't cross, because kissing Hollander the way he actually wants to is the door that opens onto everything else, and Ilya has never been ready for everything else. Not when he knows he can’t have anything else.
He gives him everything he has to offer. Everything he is good at. All that he is good for.
But he keeps his mouth from Hollander's for the entire rest of the night.
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After, the suite settles into something quieter. Ilya brings back two washcloths, passing Hollander one of them along with a glass of vodka. He is a good host, regardless of everything else. He reclines beside him against the headboard of the bed and lights a cigarette.
Hollander says nothing about the cigarette. Ilya is almost disappointed. Come on. Be annoying about it. Give me something to push against so this feels more like it’s supposed to be.
But Hollander just lies there, his back against the headboard beside him, quietly drinking the vodka, all flushed and spent and so unreasonably beautiful it borders on offensive. The quiet settles between them, stilted and awkward.
"So, Russia this year was something else. It’s intense there," Hollander finally says. Something in the room shifts then. “Are you heading back soon?”
Ilya blinks. "Back?"
"To Russia for the summer?"
Ilya nods automatically. "Oh, yes."
"Why?" Hollander turns the glass in his hands, looking at it rather than at Ilya.
Ilya's fingers go still on the cigarette. That sounds like a stupid question to him. “What do you mean, why?”
“Do you have to?”
Like he has a choice. “There is no ‘have to.’ It’s home.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know. Is it safe?” And then, in that naive, genuine way of his, probably a product of his Canadian upbringing and supportive friends and family, Hollander asks, "Or, like, do you even like it there?"
“What difference does it make?”
He does not like this topic of conversation. He can feel his mood dropping with every passing second. He thinks about his father's voice on the phone, angry and unyielding. He thinks about the Moscow apartment that doesn't feel like anywhere. The long, airless summer. His brother casually calling him slurs and demanding more money in the same breath. His father's wife and her closed-subject smile.
He hopes Hollander doesn’t notice his shaking fingers as he brings the cigarette back to his lips. He closes his eyes. "I should sleep," he says.
"Oh," Hollander says, sounding disappointed or embarrassed, and abruptly sits up straight. "Yeah, me too. I should get going anyway."
Don't. It moves through him suddenly and completely, breaking loose from somewhere within him. Please. Don't go. Stay. I don’t have anyone, and I feel less alone with you.
He says nothing.
He closes his eyes, because he can’t bring himself to watch Hollander leave, and just listens instead. Hollander in the bedroom, then the main room.
"So, uh, I’m off," Hollander says from near the door.
Don’t go. "Goodbye, Hollander," he says instead.
The door closes quietly, and inside Ilya, something cracks.
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The room is very quiet. Ilya sits in it, his eyes closed, as he waits for the hollowness in his body to settle into something he is comfortable carrying. He feels off, like someone cracked open his chest and pulled out everything they could manage to get to.
He can’t tell if he’s numb or hurting all over. Maybe both? Does that even make sense? Why is he feeling this way?
He opens his eyes. He should clean up. He can do that.
He moves through the suite on autopilot, disposes of his cigarette, and strips the bed of the top sheet, replacing it with the spare from the closet. He smooths it down with more care than is strictly necessary.
He then goes to the bathroom. Turns the shower on as hot as it will go and steps in without waiting, and the heat hits him all at once. He stands in it and tries to think about nothing, which doesn't quite work, but which he keeps attempting anyway because the alternative is thinking about everything and he only has so much left in his tank tonight.
He stands under the water. He somehow feels cut off from the rest of the world, the feeling of the water almost muted against his skin.
He thinks about his father. He lets himself think about his father asking twice what the score was. About his father asking him when he is coming home and if he can grab some bread from the store nearby. His father calling him lazy and unmotivated. His father's face at the Olympics, asking him if his mother had tied his bowtie so improperly, even though his mother has been dead for basically a decade.
He thinks about his mother. He doesn't usually let himself think about her, but tonight everything he keeps locked away seems to be finding its way out regardless, and he is tired of locking things away.
She would have liked Hollander, he thinks, and then immediately wishes he hadn't thought it. He can’t think about Hollander tonight.
He presses the heels of his hands against his eyes.
His legs feel unsteady. He gets down, slowly, until he's sitting on the floor of the shower with his back against the tile and the water coming down on him, and he looks at the drain and thinks nothing. Just for a moment.
The water runs.
He doesn't know how long it's been when he finally registers a voice and he feels a hand on his knee.
“Rozanov. Ilya. Hey.”
Ilya blinks, and the bathroom comes back to him in pieces. He feels disoriented, and for a second, he wonders where he is. Hollander is crouched in front of him in the shower. He is fully dressed, in his expensive shirt and trousers, all of it, the water coming down on him, soaking through the fabric and plastering his shirt to his shoulders. His hair is wet and he is looking at Ilya with an expression Ilya has never seen on his face before. It’s open and unguarded and… afraid?
"Hey," Hollander says. His voice is careful. "Can you say something for me?"
Ilya looks at him, soaking in the presence of the man he didn’t think he would see for a while. "You are getting wet," Ilya says. "That is very stupid. Your clothes—"
"Ilya." The careful voice again. "I don't care about the suit."
Ilya stays quiet, finding it impossible to look away from Hollander’s face. His lips. He’s chewing on his lower lip, looking unsure still.
Even like this, he is so pretty. Downright beautiful.
I didn’t kiss him tonight. Ilya feels a pang in his chest. “What are you doing here? What is going on?” he asks.
"I left my phone on the nightstand," Hollander explains. "I realized when I got back to my room, so I came back for it. I knocked for a bit, but you didn’t open it, and then the door was still unlocked, and the shower was running, and you weren't answering, and I just—" He stops, clenching his jaw. "I just wanted to make sure everything was okay."
Ilya looks at the hand on his knee. "I'm fine," he says.
Hollander just looks at him.
"I'm—" Ilya stops. His throat feels heavy, and his accent sounds more pronounced than usual to his own ears. "I don't know," he says, which is perhaps the most honest thing he's said all evening.
Hollander nods once, slowly, like this is something he can work with. "Okay," he says. "That's okay." He reaches past Ilya and turns the shower off. The silence that follows is immediate and ringing. "Can you stand up?"
Ilya considers the question. His whole body feels distant from him in the specific way it sometimes does after a very bad hit on the ice. "Probably," he says.
Hollander reaches out and takes his arm, and helps Ilya up, until they are both standing in the shower tray. Ilya passively thinks about how Hollander's expensive shirt is completely ruined and his hair is dripping onto his collar, and he looks, objectively, absurd. But he also looks like the most solid thing in the room.
Hollander reaches past Ilya to grab a towel from the rail. "Here," Hollander says, and wraps it around Ilya's shoulders without being asked. Then he takes another and runs it over his own face and hair.
Ilya watches him. "You should also take that off," he says, nodding at the soaked shirt. "You'll get cold."
Hollander looks down at himself. "Yeah," he says. "Probably."
He starts on the buttons. Ilya looks away. He doesn’t know why. He is more than acquainted with Hollander’s naked form by now. He has looked at him freely and extensively and in significant detail. But right now, he finds he can't quite do it.
Hollander peels the soaked shirt off and drops it on the floor without his usual neatness. He takes a third towel from the rail and slings it over his shoulder, before extending a hand toward Ilya. “Come on. Bed. We can talk there.”
It isn’t a suggestion, nor is it a command. But Ilya finds himself obeying regardless. He feels untethered, and something about Hollander’s steadiness feels like an anchor. He lets himself be steered out of the bathroom. Hollander sits him down on the edge of the bed and then sits beside him, not touching but close, elbows on his knees.
"When I found you," Hollander's voice is careful. "I think you were… somewhere else entirely. I was talking to you, and you weren't—" He pauses. "It took a while for you to come back."
"I’m fine. You do not need to worry," Ilya says automatically. “It was nothing.”
"Can you not do that?" Hollander snaps, and there's an edge in it that wasn’t there before. "Just for tonight. Stop being an asshole. Stop pushing me away. You do it all the time. You did it at Sochi, you're doing it now." He stops. Takes a breath. "If you really are fine and I'm just annoying you, then tell me that. Tell me to leave, and I'll leave. But don't just—" He gestures, a short frustrated movement. "Don't just sit there and say you’re fine like I didn't just find you on the floor, completely unresponsive. I…know we don’t usually do this. But let me help, if I can.”
The words sit in the room. Ilya looks at Hollander, and he looks back. The edge is still there, but underneath it, there’s something more exposed, almost like the specific vulnerability of someone who has said more than they planned to and is now waiting to face the impending consequence.
I know we don't usually do this.
No, they don't. They have never done this. They have done the hockey and the rivalry and the careful choreography of hotel rooms, and they have done months of deliberate distance, and they have done tonight, but they have never done this. They do not talk about anything real.
Ilya does not know how to do this. He knows how to do almost everything else.
But he’s realizing that Hollander has been extremely brave tonight, and he should try to do the same.
"I… am not good," Ilya says. He stops. Tries again. "Probably bad. I have to go back next week. To Moscow. But I—" He shakes his head slightly. "I do not like going home. It's hard." A pause. "My family is not nice. Not like yours. I don’t know. English is too hard right now."
Hollander looks at him for a moment. "Okay," he says simply. "I have an idea. How about you tell me everything that’s on your mind, but in Russian? I won’t understand, but maybe it will help?"
Ilya holds his gaze for a long moment. Then he looks away, at the lamp, at the city outside, at nothing in particular, and he speaks in Russian.
“I never want to go back,” he says. “I hate it there. And they all hate me, in their way. They don't see me at all, and they don’t care to, which is maybe worse. I pay for everything. The food, the apartment, my father's care, all of it. And the only thing I ever hear is more. More, Ilya. I need more, I want more.”
He pauses.
“And I give it. Because they are my family, and what else am I going to do? But I feel so empty all the time.”
Hollander is very still beside him, just listening with his whole body. Ilya can’t help but feel exposed by the eye contact. Over the years, he has noticed how Hollander struggles to maintain eye contact at times. But tonight he isn't looking away. Tonight, those beautiful dark eyes are steady on Ilya's face, tracking him with the focused attention he usually reserves for the ice, and Ilya finds he can't look away either. It feels like being seen in a way he hasn’t before.
He keeps going.
“My brother has hated me for a long time. He used to be nice to me when we were children, like an actual brother. At some point, that changed. I know why. He stayed in Moscow when I wasn't, he watched our father get worse while I was in Boston winning things, and he will never forgive me for it. For leaving. For needing to leave. For becoming the thing our father wanted and still somehow never being enough. I pay for everything. That is all I can give from this distance. But Alexei will never forgive me for it.”
He looks at his hands.
“My father is getting worse,” he says, quieter. “I can see it every time I go back. Less of him and more of something confused and frightened, and sometimes he looks at me and I can tell he doesn't know who I am. And sometimes I think that might be easier. That not being recognized by him might hurt less than being recognized as a disappointment.”
Hollander makes a small sound, obviously reacting to the emotion in his voice. Ilya wonders how wounded he must sound to him.
“He thinks I am lazy. That I am an embarrassment. That I will never be taken seriously, that I need to be better. And I work hard to be everything he wants me to be. What everyone wants me to be. I work until there is nothing left to prove and then I keep working anyway, because I don’t really know how to stop. Because if I stop, I will have to ask myself what I am working for. And I know the answer, and the answer is that I am trying to become someone who is not, who is not so difficult to—”
He stops. Starts again.
“I know what I am,” he says. “I know what people see when they look at me. On the ice, and off it. I am too much, or not enough. I have known since I was very small that I am not easy to be around. To care about. To keep.” He pauses. “I know this. I have made my peace with this.”
He exhales slowly.
“And somehow, through all of this, I can't stop thinking about you. I have been trying so hard not to think about you for years, and I cannot stop. And I don't know what to do about that. Because I can never go back to Russia, if I were to do something about it. If anyone knew. Everything I've built there, everything that is left of my family, all of it would be gone. I know what it would cost, but I'm sitting here thinking about it anyway.”
He stops. His eyes feel hot before he can stop them. He blinks hard, pressing his mouth into a thin line. One tear tracks down his face, and he turns his head further away from Hollander. Then, in English, he says, "Okay. I'm done."
"Hey," Hollander says softly. Then the bed shifts, and Hollander is moving, swinging a leg over, settling into Ilya’s lap. His arms come up around Ilya's neck. He doesn't say anything else. He just holds on, his face close to Ilya's, waiting.
Ilya sits very still for a moment, with his arms at his sides. Then, slowly, he wraps his arms around Hollander's back, and he holds on.
They stay like that for a while. Neither of them says anything, because there isn't anything that needs saying right now.
Hollander—no, Shane—brings a hand up slowly and cups his jaw, and turns his face gently toward him. And when Ilya finally looks at him, he kisses him. Soft and slow and intimate, in a way that’s different from every other kiss they have ever had. His other hand comes up so he's holding Ilya's face in both of his, thumbs light against his cheekbones, and Ilya feels it move through him. His hand finds the back of Shane’s neck, and he pulls him closer and kisses him properly, the way he's been keeping himself from all evening, the slow, deliberate kind that means what it means and makes no attempt to be anything else.
Shane lets out a sigh against Ilya’s lips, and Ilya wonders if there is any chance Shane wanted to kiss him just as much he wanted to kiss Shane. If that was even possible. When they break apart after a while, neither of them moves.
“I wish I could speak Russian,” Shane comments.
Ilya chuckles. “I could teach you,” he says. “You could probably learn it in a week. No accent. Perfect. Bonjour.”
Shane smiles. “That’s French, Ilya.”
“Yeah, I know, Hollander.”
There is a pause, before Shane speaks up. “Do you feel better?”
Ilya thinks about it. He does. He feels more settled than he’s felt in months. He doesn't quite know how to describe it in either language. So, he just says, “Yes, better.”
Hollander's forehead comes to rest against his. "I'm here," Hollander says. "Okay? I'm not going anywhere."
Ilya closes his eyes.
"Okay," he says. And then, quietly, he says, “Thank you, Shane.”