Work Text:
It's pretty obvious all day that Shane's having a breakdown.
Ilya would say that by now he is intimately familiar with Shane's breakdowns. He has his hockey breakdowns, where he gets so intensely focused that he can't do anything but practice his shot accuracy and talk about his shot accuracy and watch ESPN clips talking about his shot accuracy and will snap at anyone who interrupts him. He has his food breakdowns, where he spends three hours on the phone with his nutritionist consulting on how much flax should be in his morning protein smoothie and then throws away all Ilya's Doritos when he comes out. He has breakdowns about his sexuality, which are historically the worst and most stressful of them all, although thankfully have been far lesser this summer since he told his parents.
Shane's an intense kind of guy. It's not that he's fragile, but he walks a tight line in every single thing that he does; cares about things deeply, and is determined to be the best, with the best possible outcome for everything he tries. Most often, Ilya has found, the best thing to do is leave him alone until he gets tired from spinning out, and then pin him down and fuck him until he forgets what he was talking about to begin with. This method has been working well most recently.
Unfortunately, tonight, he doesn't have that choice. They've got other plans.
"Ilya, where's the good silverware?" Shane asks, his eyes glassy and anxious, a strand of his floppy hair falling into his eyes. The kitchen smells like cleaning supplies, scrubbed spotless earlier in the day, and Shane's wearing a Boston Raiders t-shirt with a nice pair of slacks, because all he owns is formal wear or athleisure and he's terrible at mixing them. Ilya is so fond of him it hurts, somewhere low in his gut.
"We have good silverware?" Ilya hasn't even seen half the shit that was pre-furnished into the house yet, since it was mostly done through Shane's impersonal decorating company while they were gone. "Shane, it is just Marley. Give him a fucking plastic spoon."
"Ilya, he needs real cutlery. He's our first guest, at, you know, our place. Oh, shit, I've gotta start the grill too—you definitely think he'll stay for dinner, after you tell him?"
"Of course he will stay. He does not care, and he loves free food. Your giant recipe will solve everything."
There's an absurd number of hamburger patties laid out on the counter in front of him. Ilya's never seen Shane cook a single thing from scratch before; he's not sure why Marley's visit is the exception, other than the obvious reason, which is that Shane is losing his mind.
It's nice being here, together, even if Shane is panicking. They've spent the past month in Canada, holed up at Shane's parents' cabin, but they're back in Boston now—there's training and conditioning to get back to, events to attend, sponsors and publicists to fend off. Their quiet getaway over, the real world beginning to creep back in. The new version of the real world, at least.
Because now, they're in their house, tucked into an isolated spot outside of the city and neatly furnished by Shane's team of designers. Their house. The places they both have for show, closer to the rink, will see more wear when the new season gets underway, but for now it's just them, out here by themselves. Sharing space.
Sharing a lot of things.
The doorbell rings at seven thirty, a half hour after he told Marley to be here, and still, apparently, too early for Shane, who leans against the counter and drops his head between his arms. "Oh, god," he says, sounding like he might throw up.
"Hollander, I have so many embarrassing pictures of Marley. You do not need to worry. I could leak the worst dick pic he has ever taken right now if he pissed you off."
"You have his dick pics?" That gets Shane to raise his head, levelling Ilya with an irritated stare; some would call it jealous. Ilya grins. He knew that would work.
He stands behind Shane at the counter and presses against his body for a moment; kisses the back of Shane's neck, squeezes the broad expanse of his middle where his summer bulking has filled him out with delicious handfuls for Ilya to rub against. Smells the warm scent of his skin, kisses the crook of his shoulder again, feeling Shane release just a little of that tight tension and lean back into him. Ilya's becoming a little too interested in the whole thing when the doorbell rings again.
"Fucking Marley," Ilya mutters, pulling himself away from Shane's hot, comfortable body with a level of self-control he's rarely managed to muster in his life. Before he turns to get the door, he meets Shane's eyes one last time and tells him, "Relax. It will be fine."
Shane lets out a shuddering breath, and Ilya goes to get the door.
Marley's on the doorstep with his sunglasses halfway down his nose, an impressive crimson sunburn on his face, and one of his thick eyebrows raised as he looks around the private treeline surrounding the expansive property. He's wearing sweatpants and slides and holding a bottle of whiskey that probably cost as much as his car.
"How's it going, bro?" he says, dapping Ilya up and drawing him into half a hug by their clapped hands. "This place is bougie as shit. I thought you were moving to that penthouse outside the rink this year, what gives with the secluded murder mansion?"
"Marley," Ilya says. He didn't practice this part, no matter how much Shane begged him to—tried to make him play out worst-case scenarios, offered to write him cue cards, of all things. Ilya works best off the cuff, and he's not, despite Shane's begging, not really worried. So he just says, "That is part of my ulterior motive to bring you here. You are going to have to keep a secret."
"Hell yeah, brother, I'm great at secrets. Oh, you didn't actually kill someone, did you? Cus I might draw the line at doing the dirty work, just a heads up, but my cousin probably knows some mafia fucker we could hire for what you're making—"
He kicks off his slides and walks into the house, checking out the huge glass wall and curving marble sideboard, and Ilya can tell the exact moment he finds the open-plan kitchen. Where Shane is.
"Uh," Shane's voice says, echoing from the other room as Ilya follows them. "Ilya's supposed to do this part."
"Didn't realise this was a team party, sorry, Hollzy. Who else is coming? I'd have brought more booze if I'd known. You still only drink that ginger ale shit?"
"Nobody else is coming," Ilya tells him, following Marley into the kitchen, blowing a curl out of his own face with a puff of breath. He leans against the counter beside Shane, popping his hip and raising an eyebrow at Marley, and says, "This is the secret. Me and Hollander, we are lovers."
Marley drops his expensive ass whiskey, and it shatters all over the brand new slate tiled floors.
Shane makes burgers like he does everything else: intensely and by-the-book. His recipe was for twice as many as they needed, but Ilya doubts there'll be leftovers. By the time Marley's done cleaning up glass from the kitchen floor, Shane has the grill fired up, and Ilya has trailed out onto the evening sunshine of the patio behind him. Marley emerges from the sliding door with a guilty look on his face; Ilya gives him an unimpressed eyebrow back.
"You could have dressed nicer for nice dinner," Ilya says, judgementally, looking at Marley's Adidas sweatpants and Raiders shirt with the sleeves cut off.
"Yeah, well, I didn't know I was coming to meet your fucking wife, dude."
Ilya reaches out to sock him in the shoulder.
"He is not my wife, he is my husband, that is the whole fucking point."
Marley hits him back. Shane, firmly, from his spot in front of the grill, says, "To be clear, we're not married."
"Oh, yeah, shit. Sorry, dudes. Insane that it's not legal yet, right?"
"It has been legal in Boston since 2004, Marley," Ilya says, although the fact that it isn't all over the country yet is, in fact, insane to him. Not that he wants to think too much about gay politics in the two different countries he is a resident of, lately.
Shane looks over at him, blinking. There's a weird moment of quiet, just the grill sizzling and the air rustling the trees.
"Uh," Shane says. "Really?"
"What, you did not know this? You have been gay in this city for years."
"I knew Massachusetts legalised it, I didn't know when. It's not like I'm reading up on that kind of shit."
The subtext lies between them; that Ilya, on some late night when his dreams were too big for his head, had looked it up. Gay marriage in Boston, specifically. A place he lives, but is not a permanent resident of, with a man he loves, but who is not his fiance, in a relationship that works, but has to be secret. Very stupid dreams.
The patio chairs are sprawled around the table; Ilya drags one out, within distance of Shane at the grill, and flops into it. The legs squeak against the concrete floor. Their new garden has a hot tub under a covered awning, a pool, a huge dinner table, and, in a well-landscaped corner by the high privacy fence, a fountain made of incomprehensible modern shapes. Ilya thinks its carved globes and ovals of stone look a bit like a dick and balls from the right angle. The sound of the water gurgles, and Marley watches the both of them.
"I just read it in some thing Svetlana sent me," Ilya says, half a lie, not entirely; "When we talk about how things still are in Russia, you know?"
The silence sits awkwardly. Shane reaches out to touch him, then glances at Marley, hesitates; then, with the big big bravery he sometimes has for issues only related to Ilya's sadness meter at any given moment, ignores Marley, and touches him anyway. One of his warm hands slides onto Ilya's knee, squeezing the bare skin beneath the hem of his shorts, rubbing at the grain of his hairs. Ilya's soul shakes back into place inside his body.
Marley says, "So are we fucking drinking or what, brothers?"
They crack beers, even Shane, which goes to show how ridiculous this night is. Marley keeps looking between the two of them; back and forth, Shane's hand on Ilya's leg, the space between their bodies. He looks like he's expecting Ashton Kutcher to leap out and tell him he got pranked, or whatever that show that Ilya sometimes sees at 2AM in hotel rooms is.
While the burgers cook and Shane stands over them with the same intense supervision Yuna does over Shane's hockey, Marley finally says, "Okay, if you're gonna say sike, you can do it now."
"Come on, Marley, you really think it is that fucking crazy?"
Marley lets out a big, expansive breath. He sprawls back in his chair, legs wide, tilts his skull into the hard iron of the chairback.
"I guess I should've seen it coming. You two're always weird as shit, and I knew you like dudes, which again, bro, I'm chill with. It's just—"
There's tension in Shane's back; he's not looking right at them, but Ilya can spot it from here. The hard line of him focusing so intently on grilling, because it's the only thing in the situation he can control. Like he thinks if he makes a good enough burger he can cure homophobia or something. Like their relationship is something that he needs to make up for.
"What is it, then? Why such a big problem?"
Maybe Ilya has his hackles up a bit too much. The first few weeks of summer were so idyllic they feel almost only threatening; he was being lulled into a false sense of security by the gentle embrace of the Hollander family, by being able to hold Shane's hand all day around the isolated cottage and kiss him in plain view, by being gently adopted by Yuna and David in all their well-meaning eccentricities. He got too complacent. He knows he needs to make up for it, now. Needs to remember that the rest of the world won't take them in like that.
There's another long year of protecting this secret ahead of them. He's already trying not to think about the imminent announcement of the Olympic rosters, which he and Shane will nearly certainly be on, taking them to Russia together for the first time. Ilya will have to get a lot tougher before then.
"It's not a problem, man. Dude, you know me better than that, it's not." Marley reaches across the table and toasts their beers together; the ultimate sign of acceptance in frat-bro culture. "I'm just thinking what the hell we're gonna do about the team. I can get Connors on board to knock sense into a few heads, and Feller's retiring so who gives a shit, but Mullet will for sure be weird and I got no idea how we'll stop Loops from going off about it all. Shit, have you told Coach yet?"
Ilya, brow furrowed, says, "Marley, slow the fuck down. We are not telling anybody else right now. That is why I said you have to keep it secret, idiot."
"Oh." Marley blinks. "Wait, you're just gonna be together and not tell anyone? That sounds like it would suck."
"It sucks, but we have been doing it already for nearly three years, we are kind of experts by now."
"Sorry, did you say—did you say years?"
Shane rolls his eyes a bit, jabs Ilya's side; he goes right for the part he knows makes Ilya squirm the most, with the intimate familiarity of someone who knows every inch of Ilya's body, from the high arches on the soles of his feet to the pattern of the hair in his armpits.
"This is why I told you to practice telling him," Shane says to Ilya, unimpressed. "You're leaving out all the important bits."
"Not lying, bro, a little context would be sick as hell right now."
Ilya sighs. Sips his beer. Says, "What is there to tell? It has been happening practically since Shane joined the team. We have been very tortured. It has been hell. We are too in love to stop doing it, so now we just have to figure it out, yes? So now we have a secret house, secret relationship, extra secret list of very few people who are allowed to know. Welcome to the list."
The list now includes three of their friends, Shane's two parents, and the nebulous NDA-forbidden insight of the cleaning service and landscaper for their new place. It's already more than Shane's comfortable with. Ilya, now that he's out the other side of the worst fits of worry and depression about how much Shane loved him, can also see the logic in keeping it small. Marley is their biggest compromise.
"Wait," Marley says, "Who'd you tell before me?"
"Uh, Shane's parents, we told just before the summer. And Pike knows."
"You told Pike before me?"
"Not really, he is just too nosy for his own good."
"He's not nosy," Shane objects, "It was just bad timing. He, uh, walked in on us, last year."
"Shit. So not fair that he's known for a year, dude, you asshole. I'm supposed to be your best friend."
Marley winks and swallows the last of his beer, so Ilya knows he's not actually mad. It's the way they bond with each other—jabs and needling and the blanket permission to be the biggest asshole in the room if you need to be and not get called out. He's always appreciated that about Marley. He's steady as a rock; nothing really phases him. Tonight might be the closest Ilya's ever seen him to bothered, and even then, he's over it pretty quick, or is at least pretending to be. Nobody else on the team would be this calm if they found out. He knows that for a fact.
"I know it is surprising," Ilya says, a little quieter, while Shane turns back to the grill, futzing with the burgers. "Me and Shane. But it is very important. I hope you are okay with it."
"Brother, you know I'm always okay with you," Marley tells him. He leans closer across the table, fixes Ilya with an intense look; the serious, dark-eyed stare of the rare times he really means business. The only other time Ilya has really seen Marley look like this is right before he kicks the shit out of someone on the ice. The look itself is not violent, but it's serious, earnest in a way Ilya doesn't know what to do with. "You don't gotta worry about shit with me. You're my fuckin' captain. If you and Hollzy need to bone down with each other to drag our team to the Stanley fucking Cup again, I'll sit in the corner and hand you the damn condoms myself if I gotta."
"Wait until you hear about the best part of fucking men, Marley. Do not need a condom if nobody can get pregnant."
"Jesus, Ilya, stop telling him about our sex life," Shane complains behind him. Ilya laughs at Marley's face, at Shane's discomfort, at the absurdity of this entire situation around him. "Food's nearly ready. I think. I don't actually know how to tell on a grill if it's cooked."
He's poking gingerly at the burgers with a pair of tongs it looks like he's never used in his life. Even while they were away with Shane's parents in the Canadian countryside, he never saw Shane do any real cooking; David made most of the meals, Yuna occasionally taking over, and Ilya very proudly made a couple of very basic sandwiches for lunch a few times. Shane mostly just watched. Once took nearly twenty minutes cutting up a bell pepper with the obsessive, focused precision of a generational athlete and the skill and experience of a newborn duck. Why he decided to cook tonight is far beyond Ilya's guess, except that Shane sometimes feel like he needs to prove these things; that he can be a caretaker, that he can be an adult, that he can be competent in everything he does. Ilya usually just lets him get on with it.
"Now this is why you call in the big guns," Marley says, standing up. He's so absurdly tall, looming over Shane as he knocks him out the way of the grill. "Shove it, Hollzy. I know you're a prodigy on the ice and all but nobody backyard barbecues like me."
Shane hovers for a moment, watching with furrowed brows like he's not sure if this is something he's supposed to care about winning or not. Ilya grabs Shane's wrist, feeling his warm skin, and tugs him close. When Shane lets himself be dragged to stand beside Ilya's chair, Ilya wraps an arm around his middle, presses the side of his face to Shane's hip, rubbing a bit to make his t-shirt ride up a little. Enjoys the feeling of his cheek against the tiniest bit of bare skin there.
Prodding at the burgers, Marley glances over his shoulder. Looks at the two of them touching, an evaluating look in his eye. Ilya knows, well by now, that Marley's not as stupid as most people think he is. In some ways he's one of the sharpest guys on the team—he can't spell or do math to save his life, but he's got a keen, observational kind of eye. He notices things.
"Hey, dudes, the whole secret thing?" Marley asks, looking back down at the grill as he flips a burger, casual as anything. "That's gotta suck. I know the guys can be kinda shitty in the locker room, but if it's just league shit keeping you from telling people, we could figure that out, yanno? Talk to the You Can Play dudes or something. Just saying. I can help, if knocking some heads together would make it easier for you."
It's a nice offer, but it doesn't touch even half of what they've dealt with already when it comes to this. Shane swallows; Ilya can feel the motion of it in his body, pressed close to him. Feels the vibrations when Shane speaks.
"We appreciate that, but it's just not that simple. And, uh, it's not just the league, really, either."
Ilya's birthday was a week after they won the cup. Less than two weeks later, the new law had been signed.
He tells Marley, "I don't know if you heard, but they passed a new law in Russia. It has a lot of complicated words, but really, they are just trying to make it illegal to be gay, or anything like it. I don't know yet how it will play out, but I know it has only been getting worse, in Russia, to be even a little bit gay. If something happens to get me kicked out of the league, it could be very bad to lose my Visa and get sent home with people knowing about me."
Ilya had already been in Canada when the news came through, but everyone had already known it was going to happen. David's morning newspaper had laid out the facts of the change in impersonal, removed language; marvelling on a foreign country that a provincial Canadian publication had no connection to. Ilya had read it clinically from the Hollanders' kitchen island. Avoided everybody's looks.
"Shit, bro," Marley says.
"Yes," Ilya agrees. "Shit."
Shane, nervous as he ever is when they bring up the topic of Russia, smooths a hand down the back of Ilya's hair for a moment; his strong palm rubbing at a knot of curls, a grounding weight.
"Well, we better keep you in fucking Boston, then," says Marley, as simple as ever; and, then, "Meat's ready, boys."
They load up burgers and sit out at the table in the evening sun, crack more beers, talk a little about the upcoming season. There will be a few trades to settle in, a new rookie. Like every year, the energy of the locker room will need to be found again, re-negotiated around the constant shift of personalities in a sport where you can be shipped to another city at a moment's notice. Still, coming off a cup win, things will feel easier. They'll all be riding that high for a while. The pressure will mount, too, but Ilya likes pressure.
The burgers are good. The perfect amount of cooked.
Halfway through their food Marley snorts, a short, derisive explosion of amusement out of nowhere. Ilya looks at him. This night has been so exhaustingly strange already that he's not sure he has any surprises left in him.
"The fuck are you laughing at?"
"Remember after you first told me you liked dudes, and I was like, worried there was another secret gay dude in our locker room? I thought it was pretty unlikely, but check it out. I was right, man."
"Oh my god," Shane says, like he's mortified, putting his head down into his hands. He still doesn't really like hearing the word gay, especially not in proximity to hockey; he always looks like he's about to break out in hives. Ilya, perhaps because the adrenaline of the day is wearing off, finds it abruptly hilarious. He throws his head back and laughs to the sky, wishing, in a recently rare kind of way, that he had a cigarette. The feeling of breathing out smoke would be meditative, right now; like breathing out this entire day.
He knew Marley would be okay with everything, of course. Ilya already came out to him, the hardest part, and Marley was chill about it, and nothing changed about their friendship. The stress of this night was more through Shane, but, still, it leeched onto Ilya. That maybe Marley wouldn't be cool about it when Ilya was actually fucking a dude, not just talking about it. That having two queer guys on the same team would be too much for him.
None of the worries were founded, and he knew they wouldn't be. There are very few people in hockey that he'd trust to not have an insane reaction, and Marley doesn't exactly talk in perfect language about any of it, but he is safe.
He's one of Ilya's best friends—him, Shane, and Sveta, a tight circle. The only one of his best friends he hasn't fucked, although, looking back on some of the times they were completely wasted together, Ilya's not even completely convinced Marley would always have said no to a blowjob.
"Okay, I got one more question," Marley says.
Ilya shoves half a bread roll into his mouth and chews. "What?"
"D'you think you two are like, trading hockey power through your jizz or something? 'Cus there's seriously no reason you both should be that good, like you're superhuman. Maybe you're rubbing some kinda super testosterone pheromones on each other all the time?"
"Marley, you are a fucking idiot," Ilya says, greatly amused, and Shane, red in the face, throws a bottle cap at Marley's head. Perfect aim, of course.
"We were that good before we started fucking, Marleau, oh my god," Shane says, mortified, sounding snappish in that adorable way he gets when he's embarrassed and looks like he wants to go on a killing spree. "Don't be a dick just 'cus you couldn't find the goal if it was on the end of your stick."
"Lyubimy, he is joking," Ilya says, but he's too fond to really sound convincing, and Marley's laughing his head off anyway, so it doesn't matter.
It's gorgeous out on the patio, late evening sunshine starting to pour through the treeline and reflect off the glinting glass walls of their house. Only a couple of weeks into living here together, it still doesn't feel real. Everything's too perfect. They'll live in it longer, make it their own; they've got a building company lined up to install an artificial ice rink in the basement next month, they're planning to adapt the sauna room. They can talk about these kinds of things, now. Domestic, practical things, for the both of them. For their life, that they're sharing. Just them, and their friends, for now.
Ilya gets Marley another beer to make up for Shane beaning him with the bottle cap, but Marley doesn't seem to mind. After all, he's known Shane for years by now, too. They were already family.
When Marley has gone home and the dishwasher has been loaded to Shane's exacting standards and they're in bed together, hair wet from the shower—their bed, the one they share, with their wildly expensive orthopedic mattress and the bar on the headboard that Ilya intends to tie Shane to as soon as they have a free weekend—Shane nudges him.
"Hey," he says. "Was that okay, do you think?"
Ilya's full up of everything—hot strange emotions and good food and his stupid friend and the feeling, so rare and new to him, of not really being alone. He could burst. He could split at the seams and he thinks it would all come out like goopy sunshine.
"It was good." He rolls so he and Shane are fitted together more in the centre of the bed, tucks his chin against Shane's warm, bare shoulder. "I am glad he knows. We can trust him, and he will help, when we need to hide things. It will make it easier."
He kisses Shane's shoulder, wet mouth in the crook of his neck, the dip of his clavicle. Shane's hand comes up behind his head, knots in his hair, just hard enough to hurt in the good way.
"Okay," Shane says, scrunching his hair some more; then, thoughtfully, adds, "Hey, do you think we really are sharing performance-enhancing pheromones through our jizz? That would be cool."
Ilya loves, loves, loves him. What a freak.