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Ilya knew he was in love with Shane. Hopelessly. The irreversible kind.
His mother used to tell him love was beautiful. Love gave people strength. She had not said that love could also be inconvenient; it could be devastating. Love had never stopped his father’s criticism of him. Love had not kept his mother alive.
Love did not give him the words for Shane, not for all the want in him, not for anything that might have mattered. Love held his heart too high, somewhere no one could safely reach. One touch, one wrong breath, and it might slip into the abyss.
Still, Ilya loved Shane. He could not reason his way out of it. He could not train it out of himself. Common sense had done nothing for him.
In English, they said “fall in love.” Ilya hated the phrase because it was true. Love was dark water, and he was the idiot already falling into it. Once it took you, you did not get to choose the depth, the current, or the place where it ended.
So before the next wave took him, he wanted one day on the surface. One day to float. One day to feel the cool water pass over his fingers and call it happiness before it was gone.
That year, the postseason had ended early for both of them. Shane was injured and out. Ilya had played the first round against New York with bruised ribs and still lost. His body and his pride had both been pushed to the edge, and his anger had no useful shape.
He had to face the loss. Worse, he had to face the part of himself that was hurt by losing. In Ilya’s family, a bad stretch was treated like a character flaw.
Shane had asked him to come to the cottage. Ilya had gone back to Moscow instead, with pain and pride packed into the same suitcase. Besides, he missed his niece. His brother was the penalty.
It was a respectable excuse, which made it more useful. Moscow meant family, recovery, distance. Moscow meant no cottage, no kitchen, no morning light on Shane’s hair, no towels hung to dry in a place Shane had chosen for his future, the life Shane had quietly left the door open for. Moscow meant Ilya did not have to learn what he would become if he stepped inside the life Shane had offered him.
He might not know how to leave.
So he chose the coward’s answer. He could stay far away. That, at least, was the one thing he trusted himself to do well.
May 20th gave him an excuse.
A borrowed Valentine’s Day, unofficial and artificial enough to be useful. A confession hidden inside a date, inside another language, inside a joke if he needed one. Even in Russian, even alone in his own head, the feeling made him shy.
He laughed at himself. Another voice answered, louder than reason.
Ilya, you are still half-drunk on it. Fine. Treat it like a game. You will wake up eventually.
There was nothing heroic in it. Only a soldier nearly surrounded, lifting the horn beside him and sounding it once more.
Ilya decided, entirely on his own, that May 20th would belong to Shane.
The problem was that he had no idea how to be anyone’s boyfriend. The word itself felt foreign. Boyfriend. Ridiculous.
He had taken Svetlana to expensive restaurants. He had rented out an entire theater for a movie she liked. He had bought her beautiful clothes. None of those things felt like what he wanted with Shane.
Shane was thousands of miles away. More than that, the two of them appearing together in public would probably cause an international incident. Ilya wanted a small hidden place in the world, somewhere no one knew to look, where he and Shane could live without now, without after.
He pushed the thought away before it could embarrass him further.
His teammates in love sent their girlfriends everything. Tiny things. Useless things. Breakfast, traffic, weather, complaints, dogs on the street. They could talk for three days and still find more nonsense to say.
Fine, Ilya thought. He could do nonsense.
He took a picture of his breakfast and sent it to Shane.
Three seconds later, Shane replied.
“That’s not good for your health.”
Ilya smiled.
Shane Hollander was the most boring person in the world. Ilya would bet anything that Shane’s own breakfast was worse.
“u r so boring, darling.”
His heart nearly gave him away when he typed darling.
He thought of the day Shane had left his apartment. The last warmth of him. The sudden stop after. The way everything had been pulled away at once. He was not ready for this game to end.
He had a whole list of names stored up. Darling. Kitty. Freckle beauty.
Today, he wanted his share.
Five minutes later, another message appeared.
“Are you going to training today?”
So Shane was curious about his schedule.
Ilya, generously, shared his training strategy.
“Yeah. After that I have to rewatch your game. I will score 10 more goals than you next season. 👿👿👿”
Two hours of game footage. Weaknesses to find. Openings to break through. Hockey first. Everything else after.
You’re one of the best hockey players in the league, he thought. So am I. I will beat your ass, that way or any way.
“You wish 🤓”
“🤓 Is this you wearing the glasses?”
“So that is you wearing the sunglasses 😎”
“?”
By the time Ilya finally left the apartment, they had been talking for almost an hour. Apparently, he was not so different from his idiot teammates after all. He blamed all of it on competitiveness. Even over messages, he refused to lose to Shane.
Yes, that must be it.
Definitely.
He sent Shane everything he had planned to send. The music he ran to. The neighbor’s dog he stopped to pet. A picture that happened to include his new running shoes.
After All-Star, Ilya had started reading fashion magazines in secret. How was he not one of the stylish players in the league? Maybe he could be Shane’s stylist. Shane in better jackets. Shane in shirts that actually knew what they were doing. Shane looking annoyed while Ilya fixed his collar.
A useful fantasy.
He was still amusing himself with it when he reached the flower shop at the end of the lane.
His mother had loved flowers. Moscow had a long flower season, one thing giving way to another. In May, their home had always been full of tulips.
The shop belonged to a Chinese woman his mother had known well. Every May 20th, she brought extra flowers to the house. Ilya remembered her hands most clearly, quick and neat around the stems, folding paper, tying ribbon, making something beautiful without wasting a movement.
Not because it was a real holiday exactly, she had told him once, but because in Mandarin, five-two-zero sounded close enough to I love you, and merchants were clever. Flower shops sold more flowers. Gift shops sold more gifts. People who already wanted to say something were given a date on which to be foolish.
Then she had taught little Ilya how to say it.
我爱你.
Wo ai ni.
The walk home from the flower shop was not long.
Young Ilya never dared to walk too fast. The wind might shake the petals loose. He never dared to walk too slowly either. He might forget the words before he reached the door.
When his mother took the flowers, she would lift him high into her arms and smile.
When you meet someone you love one day, remember to say it just as loudly.
Now Ilya stood outside the same shop, too old to be lifted by anyone, old enough to know that love did not make people brave in any useful way.
Almost without meaning to, he bought tulips. He took a picture and sent it to Shane, the little card tucked into the wrapping visible beneath the flowers.
我爱你.
The tulips would look beautiful in Shane’s living room.
For one stupid second, Ilya wanted to send himself too. Person and flowers together, delivered to Montreal by some impossible service with no customs forms, no fathers, no teams, no cameras, no future waiting at the door.
He asked silently.
Does this count, Mama?
Are you proud of me?
People moved around him on the street. Ilya stayed very still. He did not cry.
Shane did not answer for an hour. He had probably just finished his run.
“Do you like flowers? This doesn’t seem like you.”
“Only the unromantic don’t like flowers.”
A little while later, another photo arrived.
Cherry blossoms on a Montreal street.
Ilya imagined Shane stopping on the sidewalk to take it. This famous athlete, this serious boy, trying to find the right angle on a flower because Ilya had sent him tulips first.
It was very cute. Terrible, really.
“You’re no romantic. Just a cute little nerd.”
“😡”
That night, when the day had emptied itself out, Ilya lay in bed and called him.
They had said more to each other in one day than they had in the last few months combined. Ilya missed Shane Hollander more than he had let himself know. He missed his rival on the ice. He missed the boy who corrected his breakfast, sent him blossoms from a city street, and still sounded careful when he wanted too much.
For that, Ilya was almost grateful for the stupid game.
It had given him Shane like this. Alive in the small lit screen beside his pillow. Closer than Moscow and Montreal should have allowed.
Ilya wanted to keep all of it. Greedily. Every message, every bad joke, every silence where Shane looked away and thought Ilya could not tell.
Then Shane laughed through the phone, and something in Ilya loosened.
They would meet at the top. When people talked about Shane, they would talk about Ilya too. They would be in the same headline.
No one else knew what Ilya had made of him.
Shane knew some of it. Enough to ask. Enough to hurt.
Maybe this one moment was enough. For Ilya, this one moment was more than enough.
“Rainy day, huh?”
“Mm. I sleep better on rainy nights.”
“Maybe next time I come to Moscow, we can fall asleep together on a rainy night,” Shane said carefully.
“No. We don’t sleep. We fuck.”
Maybe they would.
Maybe they would fuck and love each other day and night.
Just maybe.
“...Good night, Ilya.”
“Good night, Shane.”
Shane did not understand, at first, why Ilya was talking so much.
Today, Ilya had sent more messages than he had in months. Not even important messages. Breakfast. Training. Dogs. Music. Shoes. Flowers. Tiny things, arriving one after another while Shane stood in his kitchen with a glass of kale juice and tried to decide what they were.
He had never known what to call whatever existed between them.
Rivals on the ice. Two people exiled in the same direction. Two men whose love for one particular form of competition had begun to exceed hockey itself. Booty call, if he wanted to be crude and dishonest. Lover, if he wanted to be insane.
No. Absolutely not.
He was trying to prove to himself that none of the echo in his head meant anything when another message appeared.
A photo. Ilya’s breakfast.
Shane looked at it once and, because he was still himself, did a quick estimate of the calories before he could stop. Sugar, fat, too much of both. An impressive assault on the concept of professional nutrition.
He frowned.
“That’s not good for your health.”
The reply came quickly.
“u r so boring, darling.”
Shane choked on his kale juice.
For one horrible second, he was very aware of his own face. His cheeks were hot. His ears were probably worse. Darling sat there on the screen, ridiculous and intimate, as if Ilya had walked into the kitchen and put his mouth next to Shane’s ear.
Darling.
Either Ilya was still drunk from some previous night, or he had meant to send that to someone else. Someone easy. Someone with better answers, no injury report, no cottage invitation left unanswered between them.
Shane looked at the word again.
Then he did what he had become very good at doing. He stepped over the obvious thing and pretended it had not been there.
“Are you going to training today?”
“Yeah. After that I have to rewatch your game. I will score 10 more goals than you next season. 👿👿👿”
“You wish 🤓”
“🤓 Is this you wearing the glasses?”
“So that is you wearing the sunglasses 😎”
“?”
By the time Shane realized what had happened, they had been talking for almost an hour.
The conversation ended only because Hayden was downstairs, waiting to drag him out for a careful run Shane had agreed to because agreeing to useful things was easier than thinking. He put the phone in his pocket. It lit against his thigh before he reached the front door.
Another message.
Then another.
Ilya was strange today. Usually their conversations came in bursts. A provocation. A need. A night when both of them were too tired or too hungry or too far away to pretend properly. Their messages had their own useless grammar. Ilya was reckless and warm and playful. Shane was careful, which did not always stop him from being honest.
This was different. Ilya seemed to be sharing pieces of his day simply because the pieces had happened. The neighbor’s dog. The song he listened to while running. A photo of flowers wrapped in paper at some shop in Moscow. Shane’s phone kept lighting in his pocket, and every time it did, something in him answered before he could decide whether to answer back.
He did not understand what Ilya wanted from him today.
Then the screen went dark, and Shane caught the reflection of his own face in it.
He was smiling.
Text had always had a dangerous power between them. Shane knew that already. A line typed out in the dark could open some private part of the body more efficiently than a hand. A word could enter through the eyes and arrive somewhere lower, stranger, less defensible. They had learned that over years. They had built whole rooms out of sentences no one else was allowed to see.
But this was not like those conversations.
This was not heat disguised as insult, or need disguised as boredom. This was something softer and harder to defend against. It felt, absurdly, like a cat brushing its head against his fingers. Shane had put his hand down without thinking, and now there was a wet nose pressing into his palm.
His heart obeyed before his pride could object.
After dinner, Shane sat on the couch and went through the photos again.
Ilya with the neighbor’s dog, or at least Ilya’s hand near the dog’s head, the animal leaning into him with shameless trust. That made sense. Ilya probably did well with dogs. He had that unfair quality, too large and too bright and somehow pleased when something smaller decided he was safe.
Shane looked at the photo longer than necessary.
Then the song. Russian title, Russian lyrics. He did not understand any of it. He had opened a translation app before his thumb moved to the next photo.
Flowers.
Tulips, wrapped in paper, bright enough to look deliberate. He could imagine them in his living room, which was a problem. He enlarged the picture, meaning only to look at the wrapping, and saw the little card tucked beneath the flowers.
Chinese.
Not Russian. Chinese.
Shane sat up.
The answer to the whole strange day seemed suddenly to be hiding there, printed on a card in a language he did not read. His chest tightened as if his body had understood before the translation did.
He searched the characters.
我爱你.
I love you.
Then he searched May 20th.
Five-two-zero. In Mandarin, close enough to I love you.
Shane stared at the screen.
What the fuck.
Was this a confession? Was it a joke? Was Ilya making fun of him? Was he lonely and bored and trying to make Shane lose his mind from another continent? Was he, somehow worse, only talking?
Shane wanted more information and immediately hated himself for wanting it. He was still looking at the search results when Ilya’s video call came through.
Shane answered.
Ilya’s face appeared on the screen, hair damp near the temple, mouth already close to a smile. Behind him, his room in Moscow looked dim and lived-in in a way Shane wanted to understand too badly.
“I spent the whole day watching the Montreal captain’s performance on the ice,” Ilya said.
Shane leaned back against the couch. “That sounds like a terrible use of your time.”
“I think I am better than him.”
“Then why are you still calling me now? Aren’t you tired of watching yet?”
Ilya’s smile came slowly.
“Never.”
Shane’s hand tightened around the phone.
“Ilya.”
“You are an awesome player to watch,” Ilya said, almost lightly, which made it worse. “We are the best players, and you know it better than I do.”
“You forgot the last time I beat your ass?”
For once, Ilya did not answer properly. He only laughed.
Shane wanted to step through the screen, and the immediacy of it embarrassed him.
He wanted to enter Ilya’s world. Pet the neighbor’s dog. Touch those ridiculous curls with his own hand. Sit close enough to hear Ilya talk about the things he loved. Food. Music. Some Russian player Shane would pretend not to know everything about already.
He wanted to hear Ilya say 我爱你 in his terrible Mandarin.
Wo ai ni.
Or in Russian. Or in any language Ilya could bear to use.
He wanted every Valentine’s Day with him. Even the ridiculous ones. Especially the borrowed ones. Not only this one, and not from so far away.
The wanting had stopped being an incident. It had furniture now. It had weather, dishes, towels, a dog on the street, a flower in a shop window. It had Ilya’s laugh coming through the phone and Shane’s hand empty on the couch beside him.
That frightened him more than sex ever had.
“Rainy day, huh?” Ilya asked.
Shane glanced toward the window. The glass was dark. Rain moved against it in thin silver lines.
“Mm. I sleep better on rainy nights.”
Ilya’s face changed a little. Only a little. Shane knew it anyway.
“Maybe next time I come to Moscow,” Shane said carefully, “we can fall asleep together on a rainy night.”
Ilya looked at him for one second, and the softness nearly ruined them both.
Then his mouth curved.
“No. We don’t sleep. We fuck.”
Shane looked down, smiling.
Of course. Ilya could not let tenderness stand in the room unguarded for too long. Shane understood that too. Maybe better than he wanted to.
Maybe they would.
Maybe they would fuck and love each other day and night. Maybe they would fall asleep anyway, out of arrogance, exhaustion, weather, and the quiet defeat of getting what they wanted.
Just maybe.
“...Good night, Ilya.”
“Good night, Shane.”