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The place smelled like garlic and fresh basil, a quiet, domestic kind of comfort. The sun was already setting outside the window, casting long strips of warm light across the room.
Ilya was at the stove, moving with the sure rhythm of habit, while Shane sat at the table, halfheartedly trying to sort through some appointments for the following weeks. His head had settled into a low, persistent ache, the kind of dull, constant discomfort that makes you want to cry, and his whole body felt off in a way that just wasn’t right — not even for an after-practice soreness.
He tried to concentrate on the screen in front of him, but his eyes wouldn’t focus. He had been re-reading the same email for five minutes now, unable to make a coherent sense of it.
He lifted his gaze and watched Ilya. He still had his back turned to him, his arms moving with quiet confidence as he sliced the last of the cherry tomatoes and let them tumble into the pan. The water in the pot was boiling, and he added the pasta as well before giving the stove one last glance, satisfying himself that everything was in order, and finally turning around. His mouth curved into a smile the moment his eyes met Shane’s.
“Dinner will be ready soon,” he said, walking up to him. He leaned down and pressed a kiss to the top of his head. Shane closed his eyes, leaning into the touch.
“How are you feeling?”
Shane shook his head lightly. “I’m fine,” he lied. “Just tired.”
Ilya nodded, brushing the hair back from his face. His hand paused briefly at his forehead, just enough to feel the heat radiating off it.
“You’re warm,” he stated, his voice coming out softer than he’d intended. “I’m sorry you don’t feel good.”
Shane smiled and closed his laptop. There was going to be no serious work done tonight, he thought. Not with the way the brightness of the screen was making his vision blur.
He stood up from his chair, rubbing at his eye. Ilya wrapped his arms around him immediately, chin resting on top of his head. He heard Shane mumble something he didn’t quite grasp against his chest, his hand moving in slow, steady strokes up and down his back.
“You shouldn’t have practiced today,” he scolded, though there was no read edge to it.
Shane mumbled tiredly. “I was okay this morning.”
“That’s not true, you said you had headache,” Ilya reprimanded. Shane’s mouth twitched in a smile. Ilya’s accent had gone a lot softer since the first time they’d met, which was nothing out of the ordinary for someone who’d left his own country when he was seventeen and had only traveled back a handful of times over the course of ten years. Still, the shade of Russian was still there — the rolled ‘r’s, the occasional dropped article, the way his tone hardened slightly whenever he got worked up — and Shane felt his stomach flip every time still, over a decade later. It felt familiar, comfortable. It felt like home.
“Slight headache,” he corrected, pulling back. “You’ve played games with bronchitis.”
“I can handle it,” Ilya said, entirely serious. “I’m not the best hockey player in the world for no reason.”
Shane smiled and rolled his eyes, regretting it immediately as he felt the pressure that had been sitting behind his eyes sharpen into something acute. A small, involuntary whimper escaped his lips before he could stop it.
“Are the painkillers not working?”, Ilya asked, guiding him back to the chair.
Shane shook his head. “I took one ten minutes ago. It’s too early to tell,” he replied, face half-buried in his arm. Ilya’s hand found its way back into his hair, moving in the same slow rhythm as before.
“Let’s just eat and then we go to bed, okay?”, he said quietly. “Lights off, blinds down. It’s supposed to help with headaches, I think.”
He waited for Shane to give him a sign of approval before walking back up to the stove.
Ilya’s eyes travelled back and forth from the stove to Shane as he waited for their food to be ready, badly concealing a concern he knew had no reason to exist.
Shane was okay. He was going to be okay. A headache was hardly something to worry over. Still, Ilya hated to see him like that.
He hated seeing Shane in any mood or situation that didn’t bring an immediate smile to his face, as unreasonable as that sounded.
There had been a time, Ilya knew, when he had been the cause of a lot of those situations, of that particular look — the quiet, contained way Shane had of carrying something he didn’t want to show.
He was aware of that, and, as much as he didn’t like to linger on those years, he didn’t let himself forget them either. He’d been careless in ways he hadn’t fully understood until much later, and Shane, being who he was, had never once made him feel the weight of it.
That was the thing about Shane. He didn’t ask for much, didn’t make a fuss. He absorbed things quietly and pretended to flush them out, because that’s what he thought everybody did. He mimicked the way Ilya pretended not to care, because any other reaction would have meant asking a question out loud he was to scared to get an the answer for. For a long time, Ilya had mistaken that for resilience, when really it had just been fear.
It had been four years since that first summer at the cottage — the first time they’d really spent time together, the first time they’d said I love you, the first time he’d let himself acknowledge that feeling — but Ilya still remembered everything. Most of all, he remembered how he’d swore he’d never made that mistake again.
Within forty minutes they’d eaten and cleaned up, both of which Ilya did most of. Shane clearly wasn’t hungry, and Ilya couldn’t help but keep his eyes on him. The way he pushed things around his plate, the careful, slow way he moved — it was like every gesture cost him something. Which, if the way he looked was any match for how he was feeling, wasn’t surprising.
By the time they got upstairs, Shane was shivering, all flushed cheeks and glassy eyes, and Ilya had to physically stop himself from pulling him close on the spot. As much as it pained him to see him like that, it also, helplessly, made something in his chest go soft in a way he couldn’t quite defend.
He walked up to the bathroom as soon as they’d were in the bedroom, rummaging in the cabinets while Shane sat down on their bed, eyes fixed on the door. Ilya reemerged one minute later, holding a thermometer and what looked like boxes of various medications. He set everything down on the nightstand, before pressing his hand against Shane’s forehead, feeling it burn under his touch. Shane looked up at him with glassy, faintly damp eyes, and Ilya leaned down to replace his hand with his lips.
He then reached for the thermometer, turning it on before offering it to Shane, who closed his lips around it without saying a word.
“Thank God I told Coach Wiebe we were gonna take a couple of days off,” Ilya joked as they waited. “Once again my sixth sense saved your ass.”
Shane huffed and mumbled something around the thermometer that sounded a lot like asshole, just for Ilya to shush him off, chuckling.
The thermometer beeped, and Ilya quickly glanced at the small screen before reaching out for the Tylenol and the bottle of water.
“Do I have a fever?”, Shane asked, almost innocently.
“38.6,” Ilya announced, passing him the pills. “So you were not “fine” this morning after all.”
Shane rolled his eyes at him, before swallowing the medication with a sip of water and dropping back against the mattress with a groan, eyes falling shut. Through the pounding of his head and the way the overheating was muffling his ears, he heard Ilya moving around — drawers being opened and closed, bathroom tap running, the small domestic sounds of the end of a day he’d somehow, at some point, grown used to.
“I should sleep on the couch,” Shane said when Ilya walked back into the room. “You’re gonna get sick.”
Ilya did not reply. Shane wondered for a moment if he’d had just thought it. Then he felt the mattress dip beside him, the duvet shifting, and suddenly Ilya was beside him, wearing nothing but his boxers. His arms wrapped around Shane’s body immediately, pulling him against his chest like it was the only logical thing to do.
“Ilya,” Shane tried, without much conviction. He was genuinely afraid of getting Ilya sick, especially considering how suspicious it would look if his arch rival casually fell ill two days after him, but the truth was he couldn’t have moved if he’d wanted to. That place — the warmth, the smell, Ilya’s quiet breathing against his head — was everything he’d wanted for so long at some point he’d stopped letting himself name it. All those years of pretending a few hours every few months was enough, that the distance was fine, that he was fine — he’d known even then. He just hadn’t let himself know it. But from day one, all he’d dreamt of every time his phone lit up with Lily’s name on it, was to be just where he was right now — falling asleep in his arms.
Ilya murmured something against his hair Shane didn’t quite catch.
“I need rest. I’m not sleeping on the couch,” he added. Then, before Shane could reply: “And neither are you, with that fever.”
Shane tilted his head up, just enough to meet his eyes. “What if you get sick?”
Ilya smirked in the faint light of the bedside lamp. “I’m Russian. Russians don’t get sick.”
Shane huffed, but didn’t argue. Instead, he pressed closer, Ilya’s hand moving into his hair, slow and steady.
“Did you ever think we would end up like this?”, Shane asked after a few minutes of silence.
“Like what?”
Shane shrugged under the covers. “This. Us sleeping together. Like, actually sleeping. You making me food. Making sure I don’t die of overheating.”
Ilya chuckled. He was quiet for a moment, then murmured: “No. No, I didn’t think we would.”
Shane watched him, his eyes dark and soft and patient in a way that still, after everything, made Ilya feel slightly undone. He was afraid of how much power they held over him.
“I hoped we would,” he admitted. “God, I prayed we would.”
“So you’re happy to be stuck in bed with a sick guy on a Saturday night?”, Shane joked.
Ilya looked at him, entirely serious, his fingers mindlessly massaging the back of Shane’s head. “This is the happiest I’ve ever been.”
Suddenly, he felt his eyes prickle. Maybe at his own words, maybe at the way Shane smiled hearing them, slow and unguarded, his cheeks flushed and his freckles standing out against the warmth of his skin. To think of how carefully he’d kept his distance for so long, how much he’d tried not to get too closed, too attached. All that effort, all that fear — just for it all to dissolve in the space of a second every time Shane looked at him like that, like it had never been anything other than inevitable.
“I hope you’ll do the same for me when I get sick tomorrow.”
“I thought Russians didn’t get sick?”
Ilya smiled. “We’ll see. There are a lot of things I started doing since meeting you that I didn’t do before.”
Shane closed his eyes, his nose scrunching faintly as Ilya kissed it.
It had started raining outside. They could hear the drops crashing to the sidewalk, the quiet blow of the wind against the windows. They drifted off like that, to the warmth of each other’s body and the steady rhythm of their breaths, knowing every single thing they’d been through had been a piece of their puzzle. It wasn’t perfect, and putting it together had been anything but easy, but it was theirs, and the image was becoming clearer and clearer with every passing day.
They couldn’t know, but right before they fell into a deep sleep, they both had the same thought: I’d do it all over again.