Work Text:
Ilya’s phone has been playing through the house's speaker system for almost three hours now, long enough to have run the duration of his playlist titled ‘couch stuff’. It had clicked into the playlist radio, continuing to curl slow smooth music low and warm through the space.
Not that Shane or Ilya had noticed, curled up on the couch in a mess of limbs heavy and warm, half asleep, half talking, half fooling around. They’d fucked there as the afternoon sun leant back into the twilight of the evening, Shane bent over the back of the couch with the bulk of Ilya pressed up over top of him, fingers curled together against the charcoal coloured fabric.
They’d cleaned up and eaten with shower damp hair and happy flushed hot faces, sat legs crossed on opposite ends of the couch as they finished their bowls of pasta. The dishes sit abandoned now on the coffee table even now, red sauce stained white crockery, the sun long gone, replaced by the warm yellow light of the lamps scattered through the room.
The evening had stretched on lazily after dinner, an exhausted sweep of arms over head that pushed it into an edgeless evening, tangled limbs and sleepy kisses and lazy conversation. Silence blanketing them as they scroll their phones together, or doze in and out of heavy limbed naps puppy piled together.
Shane and Ilya have been in their new home together for a month or so now, no more time apart, no more goodbyes, no more dates circled on calendars no more looking back over their shoulders again and again and again. Now it's just them, husbands, one room over from each other at most. A hands reach away.
Ilya isn’t sure he will ever be able to make his way through the sticky hot joy of it. It’s overwhelming at times, like some kind of beautiful safe quicksand, all consuming how happy he feels.
Shane had finally pulled himself out of their tangle moments ago with a grunt, almost half flipping himself face first because of Ilya’s grabby hands and insistent wines of not leaving him. But Shane’s bladder had won and he’d escaped to the bathroom, body still warm from Ilya’s, shorts twisted at his hips and hoodie bunched to the side from his husband's hungry hands.
Shane walks back into the living room now, a kitten yawn rounding in the back of his throat as he raises his linked hands above his head and arches his spine in a slow open that stretches the muscles. He drops his arms with a heavy exhale, a comfortable pull through his spine at the stretch and he eyes the empty couch.
His Ilya is missing.
Shane turns his head and muffles a yawn into his elbow, rolls his shoulders and scans the room, the now empty coffee table, and hears the soft thud of dishes in the sink over the music and uses the obvious clues to take himself to the kitchen.
When Shane finds his Ilya, he has his back to him, stood tall and wide over the sink, curls flat, pressed and and frizzy on the back of his head where he’d been laying on the couch. The shirt he's in is threadbare, thin white soft cotton worn in over many years, stretched across the bulk of his shoulders in a way that made Shane’s stomach tighten in appreciation. It fit Ilya differently than it had in his early twenties, Shane remembers, where it had been looser across his back, what it had looked like before the small tear in the neckline.
Shane presses his lips together, presses his socked toes down against the floor and swallows as he watches his husband do the dishes. Watches the bubbles of the soap slip down the side of the sink and up the bulk of his forearms because Ilya always uses far too much dishwashing liquid. Watches Ilya stack the dishes in the order shane likes them, so they drain properly.
Shane watches him sway just so, an easy movement side to side to the new song that had just started to play though the speakers in the home with a slow pull of full strings, a humming melody like an arrow drawing back, like warm summer air rushing in through an open window.
A warm female voice crooned, and Shane felt goose bumps prickle at the back of his neck.
At last, my love has come along
His tongue goes heavy in his mouth, his next swallow around a pebble in his throat as he stares at the way Ilya’s back shifts with each deep breath, eyes the curve of his neck, the moles hiding at his hairline. The neat shape of his hairline from his recent haircut.
My lonely days are over
Shane blinks hard once, pushes his tongue to the roof of his mouth and picks up a hand and presses his palm to the centre of his chest for two small rubs. Something his mother had taught him when he was young, ‘when feelings feel too big for you baby, help them move through you’.
He feels like he is heavy with water, logged low in the lake, hung up and dripping in gravity from a clothes line. Like he is half awake. Like he is an all night conversation, never quite finished.
Something he doesn’t have words for lives behind his eyelids, heavy at his bottom lip.
And life is like a song
Ilya’s swaying grew with the song, limbs relaxed, loose as he moved in the way Shane had always envied, with such ease. He was fluid like gold ink from a pen, dragging out as stars were drawn. Ilya was so relaxed here, so beautiful, in this kitchen in this home in this street, just a random warm light in a window to anyone walking past.
From outside no one would have any idea the love that lived inside here, the supernova that drifted to music doing dishes.
Ilya belongs here, radiant in their kitchen in their home in their street.
Shane hardly understands how sometimes.
My heart was wrapped up in clover
The night I looked at you
Shane was moving without realising, close suddenly, his arms sliding around Ilya’s waist, who didn’t startle at the touch, humming and leaning back into Shane. His shadow, the other part of him.
“Yes, yes your eyes don’t deceive you, your sexy husband is doing the dishes” Ilya mutters, still swaying with the music, moving Shane now with how he was wrapped warm around him.
“Just in case you wanted to kiss me about it” Ilya adds with a shrug like he deserves a reward, like he didn’t do the washing up most nights.
Shane smiles at the tease, but the ache living in the back of his throat stops his reply and he tucks his face into the curve of Ilya’s neck instead. He draws his nose against the warm skin over and over. Ilya smells like their sheets, like his shampoo, like sweat, like home. Shane’s home.
I found a dream that I could speak to
a dream that I can call my own
I found a thrill to press my cheek to
The lyrics wash down over him and Shane rubs his nose in harder, slides his hands to Ilya’s hips, feels the movement of them. Shane has never cared much for music, has some songs he enjoys on his runs or in the locker room but most of the time was content listening to others music taste, when he didn’t find it just added noise and stimulation.
Shane’s not sure he’d have thought much of this song if it had not caught him in his home on a quiet night like it had, when his brain was quiet enough to listen to the crooned lyrics, let them take shape.
Surely, a song has never before made him feel like his heart was pushing up out through his ribs, wetting his eyes.
His first instinct is to be embarrassed, to tuck the emotions away and match Ilya’s playfulness he’d found him in. But like it always did, the safety of Ilya wins over- whatever he holds in his hands fits the shape of Ilya’s too- even when it’s ugly or strange or confusing. Shane never holds anything alone, not anymore.
Shane watches, dark eyes quiet, over Ilya’s shoulders as he dries his hands on a dishtowel, as Ilya reaches up toward him and feels him place a hand on Shane’s head, rubbing over the back of his head affectionately.
He doesn’t question Shane’s lack of response and Shane’s love for him pulses in his knees and his wrist. He just pets at Shane gently, hand on the back of his head, humming one low noise. A silent I’m here. A silent I’ll wait. One that Shane knows he doesn’t have to answer.
Shane tugs at Ilya’s hips, turns him and Ilya moves easily, twists and fits himself to Shane, wraps his arms around his waist as Shane’s hands slide up Ilya’s chest, one over his heart as the other cups the side of his neck. Shane’s face safely presses in somewhere between Ilya’s pulse point and his shoulder.
You smiled, you smiled
the spell was cast
and here we are in heaven
The lyrics float around the door frames and pattern the windows and Shane exhales against Ilya’s neck, thinking about the first time Ilya ever looked at him.
He remembers it, even now. The first time. The sharp eyes, furrowed brow. He wishes he could remember every single time. He loves how Ilya looks at him, how Ilya sees him, sees him, sees him.
Ilya sighs into Shane’s hair, rubs his cheek against the top of his head “O, moya dorogaya” he whispers, voice barely there and Shane hides his face further into his neck, closing his eyes to hold in the tears shimmering his lashline.
Ilya’s hand slides to his lower back and he pulls Shane in, hips together and they are swaying together now, Ilya lending Shane the easy movement of his body to shape them together, slow small steps that shuffle them on the kitchen floor.
Shane’s hand fists in the front of Ilya’s shirt, and he rests his weight into his husband, sways with him to feel the simple impossible joy of existing together.
They dance together, hazy and half formed shapes, a shifting embrace sketched in smudges by the sink. The solo movement of the room.
Shane flushes, romanced, looks down at his socked feet between Ilya’s bare ones. He thinks of the grainy footage of his parents wedding, a beautiful big white dress and neat pressed sharp maroon suit. The crinkle of film and the way they’d shone, a heart shape of pressed heads as they swirled at the centre of a ballroom.
Shane thinks this must look at least as beautiful as that had, hopes it does. Hope the love pushes the window glass right out and spills on the lawn. Hope it sends the whole street the message. Something so sweet lives here and it’s Shane’s.
The tap drips in the sink and the strings swell and shine around them, Shane takes the weight of Ilya closer, rubs his thumb where it bumps the gold glint of his cross. Wonders if Ilya ever saw his mother dance. Hopes she can see them now, hopeless in the kitchen for each other.
Ilya’s hands are warm from the hot water washing up as they push up under Shane’s jumper, to find bare skin, hold him bare palms against the smooth of his lower back. He pulls him in closer, like there's still a closer to go.
Shane thinks of school gyms, of badly lit rooms that smell like sticky punch, of not wanting to take a girls hand, of not knowing where to put his own, of sweet smelling hair and looking eyes and heavy feet.
The half there thoughts swirl away when his husband kisses the shell of his ear, knocks his nose into his hair and steps them in a slow circle, squeezes his hip in his hand.
For you are mine at last
Shane presses a small, soft, open mouthed kiss to Ilya’s neck, tastes his bare skin, takes a deep breath that presses their belly’s together and Ilya’s bare foot half steps on Shane’s socked one.
Shane feels drunk, red wine on an empty stomach drunk, this night is going well- what if we got the whole bottle drunk, have your eyes always looked that lovely at me, drunk.
He feels dizzy with it.
All the love.
All the time it took them to get home.
At last.