Archive of Our Own

The house was in Westboro Village, which was not their neighbourhood.

Shane had been clear about that with Farah, and Farah had been clear about it with ICON, and ICON had been gracious about it in writing, which was the version of gracious Shane trusted. The house belonged to a company that rented it for events and photoshoots and the sort of dinner parties where everyone photographed their food. It had exposed brick and wide-plank walnut floors and a kitchen island made from reclaimed wood that looked like it had been sourced from a barn in the Eastern Townships by someone who charged handsomely for sourcing things from barns. It was not their home. Their sofa was not in it. Anya was not asleep on the wrong end of it. Shane’s labelled spice jars were not lined up above the stove.

The distinction mattered.

“Nice house,” Ilya said, standing in the front hall with his jacket over one arm, surveying the exposed ductwork on the ceiling as though it were a personal insult. “Very... what is the word? Industrial.”

“It’s reclaimed.”

“Yes. They have reclaimed it from a factory. And now it is a living room. This is progress.”

A woman in a headset and black jeans came around the corner with a clipboard. She introduced herself as Maren, the shoot coordinator, and shook both their hands and managed, Shane noticed, not to look starstruck, which put her ahead of most people who met Ilya Rozanov in person. She led them through the ground floor: living room, dining area, a den at the back with wood panelling and a Persian rug where most of the lighting rigs were already set up. The kitchen had been converted into a staging area for wardrobe and hair. There were garment racks along one wall, two makeup stations, and a woman with cropped silver hair arranging a row of brushes on a towel with surgical precision.

“Ava’s upstairs checking the natural light in the master bedroom,” Maren said. “She’ll be down in five. Can I get you anything? Water, coffee?”

“Water,” Shane said.

“Coffee, please,” Ilya said. “Black, no sugar.”

“He’ll also have water,” Shane said.

Ilya looked at him.

“You’ve had two coffees this morning,” Shane said. “And no water.”

“Coffee has water in it.”

“That’s not how hydration works.”

“I am hydrated. I am a professional athlete. I know how to hydrate.”

“You had coffee at home, coffee in the car, and you’re about to have a third one. You’ve had zero water.”

“I was going to have water. After the coffee.”

“You were not going to have water.”

“I was considering it.”

Maren, to her credit, waited for them to finish before excusing herself.

They had arrived twenty minutes early, which was Shane’s doing. He’d built in the buffer because arriving on time for a photoshoot meant arriving late for hair and makeup, and arriving late for anything made his skin itch. Ilya had not objected. Ilya understood Shane’s margins without needing them explained, which was one of a hundred small negotiations their relationship rested on, none of them discussed, all of them observed.

The boundary document was in Shane’s phone, a PDF Farah had sent to ICON’s editor three weeks ago and received back, signed, without pushback. Shane had read it four times. He could recite it. Topics approved: the relationship, the wedding, their life in Ottawa, the team, the Irina Foundation, advocacy work, general lifestyle questions, a quick-fire round. Topics declined: specifics of the FanMail incident, the circumstances of their outing, any detailed questions about homophobia directed at them by named individuals, their sex life, and anything pertaining to Ilya’s family in Russia that went beyond what Ilya volunteered.

It was a clean document. Shane trusted clean documents.

The wardrobe racks were organised by setup. Shane could see the progression: two hangers on the first rail with shirts and trousers, both pressed; two hangers on the second rail with casual pieces, t-shirts and jeans that had been selected to look unselected; and then, on the third rail, nothing. Empty hangers. The third and fourth setups, the skin setups, didn’t need a wardrobe because the wardrobe was them.

He looked at the empty hangers for one second too long and then looked away.

The makeup artist was called Dev. He had warm hands and a quiet voice and asked Shane’s permission before touching his face, which was the sort of thing Shane noticed and appreciated. Shane sat in the chair and let Dev do his work. Foundation. Concealer under the eyes. A matte setting powder that smelled faintly of lavender. Dev explained each step before he did it, which Shane didn’t need but didn’t stop, because the rhythm of it was soothing.

In the next chair, Ilya was getting his hair tamed by a young woman named Suki who was losing the fight. Ilya’s hair did what it wanted. It had always done what it wanted. It curled where it pleased and stood up at angles that no product could negotiate with and Suki was working through it with a ceramic iron and a look of focused determination that Shane recognised from rookies facing Ilya in a shootout.

“I can make it a bit more structured at the sides,” Suki said, diplomatically, “and let the top do its thing.”

“The top always does its thing,” Ilya said. “You cannot stop the top.”

Shane pressed his lips together. Dev, without looking up from the concealer, said, “Don’t move.”

“Sorry.”

Ilya caught his eye in the mirror and grinned.

* * *

Ava turned out to be a tall woman in her fifties with close-cropped grey hair and a calm that radiated outward from her like heat from a stove. She shook their hands, held each handshake for an extra beat, looked at their faces with the frank assessing gaze of someone who made her living from light and angles.

“You two are going to be very easy to shoot,” she said. “I can already tell.”

“Easy is my middle name,” Ilya said.

“His middle name is Grigoryevich,” Shane said.

“Grigoryevich is not as catchy.” Ilya put his hand on the back of Shane’s neck, unconscious, automatic. He did it whenever they stood side by side. “What do you need from us?”

Ava walked them through the plan. Four setups across the day, progressing from dressed to mostly undressed. She was frank about it: the first two would be warm, editorial, pull-quote photos. Foundation work. Favourite restaurants. The third and fourth would be more intimate. Skin. Contact. What ICON’s readership came for and that Shane and Ilya had agreed to in advance, in a separate email chain Farah had kept meticulous records of, because meticulous records were what agents were for.

“I don’t choreograph much,” Ava said. “I’ll give you a starting position and then I want you to be yourselves. The best shots come from the in-between. The adjustments. The moments you think I’m not shooting.”

“You are always shooting,” Ilya said.

“I’m always shooting,” Ava agreed, and smiled.

The first setup was in the den. The wood panelling was dark and warm and the rug was burgundy and gold and the lighting rig threw a soft amber wash across everything it touched. Ava had placed two chairs, angled toward each other. Simple.

Shane sat. The wardrobe team had put him in a pale sage linen button-down, loose at the cuffs, and dark wool trousers that sat higher on the waist than he wore his own. The linen was cool against his forearms and smelled new, that clean chemical sharpness of unwashed fabric. Ilya was in a charcoal henley, soft cotton, pushed up past his elbows so the veins in his forearms were visible, and dark jeans with a single rip at the left knee that was either deliberate or the result of a wardrobe person with scissors. The contrast worked. Shane dark and tailored, Ilya warm and loose. Shane couldn’t have explained why, because fashion operated on a frequency he received but did not transmit.

Ilya sat. Shifted his chair closer than the marks on the floor. His knee came to rest against Shane’s, and the pressure through two layers of fabric was a sentence Shane’s body had learned to read years ago. I’m here.

“Just like that,” Ava said, from behind the camera.

The shutter fired. Not a single click but a rapid sequence, a sound like a playing card in bicycle spokes, and Shane felt his shoulders tighten.

“Shane. Don’t look at me. Look at him.”

Shane looked at Ilya. Ilya was already looking at him, his chin propped on one hand, his elbow on the arm of the chair. The henley had slipped at the collar, showing the ridge of his collarbone and the gold chain that sat in the hollow of his throat. His expression was the one he wore when Shane was explaining why four minutes was the correct steeping time for a French press. Fond. Amused. Unguarded in a way he reserved for rooms where he trusted every person in them, and Shane understood that Ilya had decided to trust this room, and that made it easier.

Shane had been looking at this face for over a decade. He knew the topography of it better than his own. The crooked set of Ilya’s nose from the break in his seventh season. The way his left eye sat fractionally higher than his right. The stubble Dev had left on his jaw, cleaned up at the edges but roughened below. And underneath all of that, underneath the angles and the history and the gold chain and the faint lines at the corners of his eyes that Shane had watched appear over the years, was the expression Ilya wore only for him. It was the one that said you are the centre of this room and you do not know it and I am not going to tell you because watching you not know it is one of my favourite things.

My husband, Shane thought. The word still detonated in his chest, six months in. My husband is looking at me and a woman is photographing it and this is allowed.

“Good,” Ava said. “Ilya, put your hand on his knee.”

Ilya’s hand was already on his knee.

“Perfect. Stay there.”

The shutter fired again. Shane’s breath settled. Ilya’s thumb moved against the inside of his knee, a small idle stroke below the hem of the trousers, against the bare skin just above his sock. The camera could not see it. Shane could feel it everywhere.

“Tell me about this morning,” Ava said, still shooting. “What did you do before you came here?”

“I had coffee,” Shane said. “Fed the dog. Went for a run.”

“He also ironed his shirt,” Ilya said. “Even though we were coming to a place with a wardrobe person who would give him a different shirt.”

“I didn’t know if I’d like the wardrobe shirt.”

“He ironed it at six-thirty in the morning. The ironing board was louder than the dog.”

“Anya is a quiet dog.”

“Anya is the quietest dog. You are the loudest ironer.”

Ava laughed. The shutter kept going.

“Ilya, lean in. Closer. Like you’re going to tell him a secret.”

Ilya leaned in. His mouth came near Shane’s ear and his breath was warm and what he said, low enough that only Shane could hear, was, “You are doing very well, my Shane.” And then, even quieter, the Russian word for beautiful, the one Ilya used when they were alone, when the lights were off and the world had contracted to the space between them. Shane heard it and the back of his neck went hot.

Shane’s ears went pink. The camera caught it.

“That’s the one,” Ava said.

She moved them through a series. Ilya’s hand on the back of Shane’s chair. Both of them looking at the camera, then away from it, then at each other. Standing: Ilya behind Shane, his chin on Shane’s shoulder, arms loose around his waist, his belt buckle a cold point of pressure against Shane’s lower back through the linen. Shane’s hands resting on Ilya’s forearms, his fingers tracing the edge of the pushed-up sleeve. Then a closer arrangement, Ilya’s mouth near Shane’s temple, Shane’s eyes half-closed, and Ilya murmured, “Your heart is fast,” and Shane said, “Shut up,” without moving his lips, and Ilya’s chest shook against his back with a soft laugh.

The contact was cumulative. Each pose built on the one before it, and by the fourth arrangement Shane’s body had stopped registering the camera as a threat and started treating it as furniture. Ilya’s hands found him without instruction. Ilya’s chin found the groove of his shoulder without being placed there. They arranged around each other with the ease of two people who had spent years negotiating shared space in secret and now, suddenly, devastatingly, were allowed to do it where anyone could see.

Shane had not been prepared for how good that felt. How it was different from touching at home, where no one saw. Here, with the lights and the camera and Maren’s clipboard and Dev’s powder brush, Ilya’s arm around his waist was a public sentence. This is mine. And Shane’s hand on Ilya’s forearm was the answer. Yes.

“You’re naturals,” Ava said, checking her display. “I mean that. Most couples, even couples who are comfortable with each other, freeze up when the camera’s on. You two forgot I was here about four minutes in.”

“He has this effect,” Ilya said, nodding at Shane. “I forget everything when he is close. Cameras. Names. My English.”

“Your English is fine.”

“It gets worse around you. This is documented.”

“By whom?”

“By me. I am the document.”

Ava laughed and Shane felt the last of his stiffness dissolve, not because the joke was funny, which it was, but because Ilya had made it for him, to make the room smaller, to reduce the audience to one.

* * *

The interviewer arrived during the wardrobe change. Their name was Noor, and they were tall and unhurried and wore a dark linen blazer over a white t-shirt. Competent face. You could see it before they spoke. They shook hands with Shane first, then Ilya, and sat on the sofa in the den with a leather folio and a recorder and a glass of water and said, “I’ve read the boundary document. I want you to know that I take it seriously and I’ll stay inside it. If anything I ask makes either of you uncomfortable, say so and we move on. There are no trick questions.”

“Thank you,” Shane said.

“And congratulations. On the wedding. I know that’s old news by now, but.”

“Is never old news,” Ilya said. He was still in his henley. They hadn’t changed yet for the next setup. He was sitting beside Shane on the other sofa, his arm along the back of it, his fingers lightly resting against Shane’s shoulder. “I am still celebrating.”

Noor smiled. Opened the folio. Pressed record.

“So. This is the first time you’ve done a joint cover for a queer publication. How does that feel?”

Shane had expected this question. He’d prepared an answer. The prepared answer was about visibility and representation and the importance of using their platform, and it was true, every word of it, and it sat in his mouth like a press release.

“Terrifying,” he said instead.

Ilya’s fingers on his shoulder pressed once.

“Terrifying how?” Noor asked.

“We’re private people. Both of us. The way we ended up being public wasn’t...” Shane paused. Noor waited. “It wasn’t our choice. And after that, we spent a long time being careful about what we let people see. This is us choosing to be seen. It’s different. But it’s still a lot.”

“And the terrifying part?”

“The photos.” Shane glanced at Ilya. “I don’t know how to pose.”

“He is lying,” Ilya said. “He is a natural. You saw. Ava took forty photos and she will use thirty-nine.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

“I am telling the truth and you are too modest. This is our dynamic. You will notice it throughout the interview. Write it down.” He gestured at Noor’s folio. “Ilya: truthful. Shane: modest.”

Noor wrote something down, grinning.

“Ilya, same question to you. How does this feel?”

“Good.” Ilya stretched his legs out under the coffee table. His ankle crossed over Shane’s, and settled there. “I am Russian. In Russia, being queer is not a thing you do in magazines. Is a thing you hide or a thing that gets you hurt. Here, I am on the cover of a magazine with my husband and a woman is doing my hair and another woman is taking beautiful photos and someone brought me coffee, and no one has called the police.” He paused. “So. Good. It feels good.”

The room was quiet for a moment. Shane felt the weight of it. Ilya delivered these things without fanfare, without indicating that what he’d said was heavy, and the lightness of his delivery made it heavier.

“Let’s go back to the beginning,” Noor said. “You were rivals before you were anything else. Top two picks, same draft year, same division. What was your first impression of each other?”

“He was annoying,” Shane said.

“He was uptight,” Ilya said.

They looked at each other.

“That hasn’t changed,” they said, at the same time, and Ilya laughed, sudden and warm, and Shane’s mouth twitched.

“I thought he was the most arrogant person I’d ever met,” Shane said. “World Juniors. Saskatchewan. I went outside to introduce myself and he was smoking behind the building.”

“I was seventeen. Everyone smoked.”

“Nobody smoked. You were the only person smoking.”

“In Russia, everyone smoked.”

“We weren’t in Russia. We were in Regina. I told him the smoking area was on the other side of the car park and he just looked at me and didn’t move.”

“I was comfortable.”

“I told my parents he was kind of a dick.”

“You told your parents about me.” Ilya looked delighted. “First day. Hollander goes home and tells his mother about the Russian boy.”

“I told them you were rude.”

“And yet you came back for more.” Ilya spread his hands. “This is the theme.”

Noor was writing fast. “When did it change? When did rivalry become... this?”

Shane looked at Ilya. This was the question they’d navigated a hundred times, in press conferences and podcast interviews and late-night conversations in hotel rooms, and the answer was never the same because the real answer was too long and too private and too tangled to give to a room with a recorder in it. The real answer was a hotel gym on draft weekend and Ilya looking at him across a row of treadmills and the years that followed where they pretended it meant nothing and then stopped pretending and then stopped being able to stop.

“Slowly,” Shane said.

“Then all at once,” Ilya said.

“That’s Hemingway,” Noor said.

“Is also us,” Ilya said. “Hemingway stole it.”

Shane looked at the floor and shook his head and Ilya’s fingers found the nape of his neck and stayed there, and the recorder turned.

“We didn’t have a moment,” Shane said. “People want there to be a moment, and I understand why, but it wasn’t like that. It was years of... of fighting something, and then years of allowing it, and then one day you look up and you’re in a kitchen making coffee for a person you’ve spent a decade pretending you don’t think about, and you realise this is just your life now.”

“He says ‘pretending,‘” Ilya said to Noor. “He was not good at pretending. He looked at me like I was a problem he could not solve. For a decade. Very subtle.”

“I was subtle.”

“You were not subtle. You were obvious and stubborn and very bad at pretending.” Ilya paused. “Also beautiful. But I did not notice that at first.”

“When did you notice?”

“I am not answering that on the record.”

“This,” Ilya said to Noor, gesturing between them, “is also our dynamic.”

* * *

They broke for the second setup. Wardrobe change. The wardrobe team stripped Shane of the linen and put him in a white t-shirt, soft and broken in, the cotton thin enough that the light came through it at the shoulders, and worn-in jeans with a frayed hem. Ilya got a dark plaid flannel shirt, unbuttoned, over bare skin. The fabric hung open and Shane could see the line of Ilya’s sternum, the gold chain resting in the groove, the flat plane of muscle that disappeared below the waistband of his jeans. They were dressed to look undressed. Shane understood the choreography of it.

The den had been rearranged. The chairs were gone. Ava wanted them on the floor, on the rug, and the lighting had been dropped lower, warmer, closer. The amber wash was gone. In its place, a honeyed half-light that pooled around them and left the edges of the room in shadow.

“Whatever’s comfortable,” Ava said. “Lean on each other. Sit however you’d sit at home.”

Ilya sat first, back against the panelled wall, legs stretched out. Shane lowered himself between Ilya’s legs, his back against Ilya’s chest, and the position was automatic, unthinking. This was how they sat on their own sofa, the TV on, Anya on the wrong end of it, neither of them wanting to move. Ilya’s arms came around him. His chin rested on Shane’s shoulder. Shane felt the flannel brush his neck, smelled the warmth of Ilya’s skin through the open shirt, and the room with its lights and its crew and its cameras narrowed to the circumference of Ilya’s arms.

This was the part that still caught him sideways. Not the being together. He’d been together with Ilya for long enough that it was as fundamental as breathing. What caught him was the permission. The sheer brazen public fact of Ilya’s arms around him while a photographer circled and a journalist sat three metres away and not a single person in this house expected them to stop. He had spent years flinching away from Ilya in public. Dropping his gaze. Removing a hand. Walking an extra foot apart. And now he was sitting between Ilya’s legs on a Persian rug in a rented house and a woman was photographing it and calling it beautiful.

My husband, Shane thought again. My husband is holding me and this is allowed.

“Do you always sit like this?” Ava asked.

“Yes,” Ilya said.

“No,” Shane said. “Sometimes I sit on the other end and he puts his feet on me.”

“His feet are cold.”

“Your feet are enormous.”

“Enormous and cold. This is the Russian experience.”

Ava was shooting. She moved around them in a slow arc, finding angles. Her assistant, a young man with round glasses and a reflector disc, repositioned himself every time she did, anticipating.

“Shane, look up at him.”

Shane tilted his head back against Ilya’s shoulder. Ilya looked down at him. From this angle Shane could see the underside of Ilya’s jaw, the faint stubble Dev had left on purpose, the small scar near his ear from a high stick in his third season. Ilya’s eyes were warm and brown and close and the plaid of his open shirt framed his face and Shane thought, with a clarity that ambushed him at odd moments: I am married to this person. He had thought it at the grocery store last week. He had thought it in the car on the way to morning skate. The word husband sat in his chest with a weight that was not heaviness but substance. Proof of mass.

“Stay,” Ava said.

They stayed. Ilya’s hand found Shane’s, and laced their fingers together over Shane’s stomach. Shane felt Ilya’s thumb trace a slow circle on his knuckle. The touch was idle, habitual, a thing Ilya did without thinking. The shutter went off and off and off.

“Ilya, press your cheek against his temple.”

Ilya did. His stubble caught against Shane’s skin. Shane closed his eyes. He felt Ilya’s chest expand behind him, a slow breath, and Ilya’s mouth curved against his temple, and then Ilya’s lips moved, forming words against Shane’s skin that were not English and not for the room. A phrase in Russian. Shane caught the shape of it, the soft consonants, the vowel at the end. He didn’t know the translation. He didn’t need to. He knew the tone. It was the one Ilya reserved for their bedroom at midnight, for Sunday mornings, for the space between sleep and waking where Ilya spoke in Russian because the truth lived there first.

Shane knew, in the calm way you know weather, that this was going to be one of the good photos. The one people would save. The one people would set as a phone background and reblog with no caption because a caption would be redundant.

“Beautiful,” Ava said. “Take five.”

They didn’t take five. They stayed on the rug. Ilya didn’t let go. Shane could hear the assistant moving equipment behind them, the soft click of a lens change, the whisper of Maren’s headset as she spoke to someone elsewhere in the house. The rug was warm under them. The panelling smelled of oil soap and age. Shane pressed his face against Ilya’s neck and felt Ilya’s pulse, steady and slow, and the room around them was busy and quiet at the same time. A rink during a TV timeout had the same quality: cameras rolling, players still.

“You smell like powder,” Shane said, into Ilya’s neck.

“You smell like Shane.”

“That’s not a smell.”

“It is for me.” Ilya’s mouth was against his ear. “You smell like laundry and soap and a little bit of nervous.”

“Nervous doesn’t have a smell.”

“On you it does.” Ilya’s arms tightened. His voice dropped, a minute shift, private, below the room’s hearing. “Relax, solnyshko. It’s only cameras. I have you.”

Shane exhaled. His body softened against Ilya’s chest. Ilya’s hand flattened over his stomach, warm through the thin cotton of the t-shirt, and Shane felt his own heartbeat against Ilya’s palm and let it be there. He closed his eyes. For a long ten seconds the room was gone. The lights were gone. There was Ilya’s breath and the rug beneath them and the smell of oil soap and cedar and the steady metronomic stroke of Ilya’s thumb across his ribs. A room full of people and none of them existed. This was the thing he could never explain to interviewers, the thing that no photograph could capture: how Ilya made rooms disappear. How he could reduce a stadium to a bench, a press conference to a glance, a rented house full of equipment and strangers to the space inside his arms.

Shane pulled back after a moment. Looked at him. Ilya’s face was soft and unguarded and the wood panelling behind him was warm and dark and Shane thought, absurdly, of a painting he’d seen once in a gallery in Montreal, two figures at rest, the light falling between them, the weight of the canvas holding them together. He had not remembered the painting in years. He remembered it now because Ilya was looking at him with that same directness. No apology. No filter.

“Five minutes are up,” Ava called.

“We didn’t start them,” Shane said.

“I know. That’s why I’m calling them.”

* * *

Noor returned with a fresh glass of water and a second recorder in case the first one failed. Shane liked that. Redundancy was a virtue.

“Let’s talk about the wedding,” Noor said. “You got married last summer. Ottawa.”

“Yes,” Shane said. “There was no venue or fuss. Just us and the people who mattered.”

“I wanted a production,” Ilya said.

Shane looked at him.

“I wanted a small production,” Ilya amended. “I wanted music. Our teammate Dykstra offered to DJ and I said no.”

“Because Dykstra plays country,” Shane said. “He would have done so at our wedding.”

“Country music at a wedding is a crime. I was protecting our guests.”

“So Harris ended up in charge of the music,” Shane told Noor. “He plugged his phone into our outdoor speakers and that was the sound system. For our wedding.”

“It worked,” Ilya said.

“It worked because Harris has good taste.”

“Harris chose our first dance song,” Ilya said. “We had not picked one. We had not even thought about the first dance. Shane’s mother had to remind us.”

“You didn’t plan a first dance?” Noor asked.

“I don’t know any songs,” Shane said.

“He doesn’t know any songs. This is true. He has never known a song.”

“I know songs. I just can’t think of them on demand.”

“So Harris played Rihanna,” Ilya said. “‘Diamonds.’ And it was perfect.”

Shane looked at him. “You always say that. Why was it perfect? It was a random song Harris picked under pressure.”

Ilya was quiet for a beat. “It was not random for me.”

Shane stared at him.

“I had always liked that song,” Ilya said, to Noor, but his voice had gone softer. “For a long time. And then we danced to it and I understood why I had liked it.”

Noor was grinning. “And the dancing itself?”

“He cannot dance,” Ilya said. “We rotated. Under the lights his mother had put up. It was the best rotation of my life.”

“The music was perfect,” Shane said, and meant it, and Ilya’s expression shifted, softened, and he reached over and put his hand on Shane’s knee, and the contention ended where it always ended, which was with Ilya touching him and Shane letting him.

“Who proposed?” Noor asked.

“I did,” Shane said.

“He did,” Ilya said, at the same time. He looked at Shane. “This is a fact we agree on. For once.”

“He filled my living room with candles,” Ilya told Noor. “Electric ones. A million of them. On the tables, on the floor, on the arms of the furniture. I came home and I thought he was trying to burn my house down.”

“You knew what I was doing.”

“I knew because years ago I had told him I would propose to him on a dock with candles. So when I saw the candles I thought...” Ilya paused. “I thought, he is stealing my idea and making it better. Which is what he does.”

“You got on your knees?” Noor asked Shane.

“One knee. In the living room. I used his full name.” Shane paused. “I wanted to get it right.”

“And he did.” Ilya’s voice was quiet. “He got it right.”

“What did you say?” Noor asked Ilya.

“I said ‘What is this?‘ And then I said nothing for too long and he got scared. And then I said ‘No,’ and then I said ‘Yes,’ and he stared at me, and I had to explain that I was saying yes.”

“It was confusing.”

“It was emotional. I was having feelings. Multiple feelings. My English was not cooperating.”

“He put the ring on his chain,” Shane said. “His gold chain. With his mother’s pendant. Because it didn’t fit his finger.”

“We got it resized,” Ilya said. “Later. For the wedding.”

Shane looked at Ilya’s hand, where the ring sat now, snug, the black band with its gold interior catching the low light.

“Where was the wedding?” Noor asked.

“Our backyard,” Shane said. “Our house is on the river, in Ottawa. We just wanted the lawn and the water and enough space for everyone.”

“How many people?”

“In the end, close to a hundred,” Shane said. “Teammates, friends, family. My parents. Coaches. Some of the other couples from around the league came. It was big. Bigger than we’d planned.”

“There were no chairs,” Ilya said. “No aisle. People stood on the grass and we stood in front of them and the justice of the peace did her part and we did ours.”

“Good light is an understatement,” Ilya added. “It was golden light. The light was gold and the river was gold and my husband was in a grey suit with a blue tie and his hair was down and he looked—” Ilya stopped. Considered. “He looked correct.”

Shane stared at him.

“This is a compliment,” Ilya said.

“How is ‘correct’ a compliment?”

“Because you are a person who wants everything to be correct and on that day you were. Your suit was correct and your hair was correct and when you said your vows they were correct and when I looked at you I thought, this is the most correct person I have ever met, and I am going to marry him.”

Shane’s throat did a complicated thing. He looked at the rug. He looked at his hands. Ilya’s fingers found the back of his neck again, and Shane leaned into the touch without deciding to.

“Vows,” Noor said, gently. “You wrote your own?”

“No,” Shane said. “Standard vows. We repeated after the justice of the peace.”

“We are not eloquent,” Ilya said. “We thought about writing them. Then we decided standard ones were better.”

“And were they?”

Ilya looked at the rug. “I was very confident I would be fine. Normal. Steady. And then I got to his name and my voice cracked and his whole face scrunched up trying not to cry and the words were...” He paused. “The words were boring. The most ordinary words. And they broke us both.”

Shane’s mouth was a tight line. Noor waited.

“He said ‘gross’ after I finished my ring vows,” Shane said, and his voice was slightly rough. “I was in the middle of being emotional and he said ‘gross.‘”

“It was a joke. Everyone laughed.”

“I laughed.”

“And then I dipped him,” Ilya told Noor. “When we kissed. I grabbed him and bent him back and the crowd lost their minds. And Anya, our dog, had a burgundy bow on her head. And she ate cake off the floor. It was a good wedding.”

“It was a good wedding,” Shane said.

* * *

The third setup was upstairs.

The master bedroom had been staged with a low platform bed and rumpled linen sheets, the light dropped to a moody half-dark that suggested late afternoon and bare skin and decisions being made. The windows had been covered with a diffuser panel that turned the daylight gauzy and blue. Ava was already up there, adjusting a softbox. The room smelled different from the den: cleaner, cooler, the sheets giving off a scent of pressed cotton and lavender detergent that was close enough to home that Shane’s body registered it as safe before his brain caught up.

“This is where it gets interesting,” she said. “Ilya, shirt off. Shane, we’re keeping the t-shirt for now but I want it pulled up. Untucked. Showing stomach.”

Shane pulled the t-shirt free from his jeans. The hem rode up and the air hit the strip of skin above his waistband and the awareness of being half-exposed sharpened him, making the room brighter.

Ilya took off the plaid shirt. He didn’t drop it. He shrugged it back off his shoulders and let it slide down his arms and caught it at the cuffs, a careless unhurried motion that was the opposite of careless, and stood bare-chested in his jeans. The gold chain caught the blue-gauze light. The scar on his left side, from the puck above the hip pad, was a thin pale crescent. The muscles of his stomach were flat and defined and there was a trail of dark hair below his navel and Shane looked at it and looked away and looked back, because he had been looking at Ilya’s body for over a decade and the looking had never dimmed. It had not dimmed when they were secret. It had not dimmed when they were public. It would not dim. This was simply a fact about Shane Hollander: Ilya Rozanov, shirtless, rearranged his priorities.

Ilya surveyed the bed, arms crossed. “This is nice bed. Nicer than ours.”

“Our bed is fine.”

“Our bed is eight years old.”

“It’s six.”

“In bed years, this is forty.”

“That’s not a unit of measurement.”

“I am making it one.” Ilya sat on the edge of the bed, bounced once, approved. He looked up at Shane and his eyes travelled over the untucked t-shirt, the strip of stomach, the jut of Shane’s hipbone above his waistband, and his expression changed. Not a lot. Enough. Shane knew that expression. It was the one that preceded closed doors.

“Every fan who buys this magazine,” Ilya said, to the room at large, “is going to lose their mind.”

“That’s the goal,” Ava said.

“No, I mean.” Ilya gestured at Shane. “Look at him. My husband. They are going to see him like this and they are going to—” He looked for the English and didn’t find it and said a Russian word that Shane knew meant something between jealousy and anguish. “Toskat. They will look at him and they will know he is mine and they will be inconsolable.”

“Ilya.”

“What? Is true. You are devastating.”

“I’m in a t-shirt.”

“Yes. You are devastating in a t-shirt. Imagine if we remove it.”

Dev, who had come upstairs to do touch-ups, pressed his lips together and concentrated on his powder brush.

“On the bed,” Ava said. “Both of you. Ilya on his back. Shane, I want you on your side, leaning on him. Chest against his ribs.”

Shane lay down beside Ilya. The sheets were cool and unfamiliar, not theirs, but Ilya’s skin was warm against his cheek and smelled of cedar and the setting powder Dev had put on him and underneath it all the permanent scent of Ilya, which was soap and warmth and skin that had been in the sun. He pressed his cheek to Ilya’s ribs. Felt them rise and fall. Ilya’s arm came around him, his hand on the back of Shane’s neck, heavy, warm, and the weight of it was the weight of every night Shane had fallen asleep with that hand in his hair. His body knew this weight. His body trusted it.

“That’s it,” Ava said. “Don’t move.”

She shot from above. Then from the side. Then from the foot of the bed. Shane felt Ilya’s thumb trace a line below his ear, a slow stroke, and the camera was a noise that was getting further away.

Ilya’s chest vibrated beneath his cheek. Shane felt more than heard the low sound Ilya made, not quite a hum, the sound he made when they were on the sofa and Shane was lying against him and Ilya was content. The sound had no audience. It was autonomic. Ilya probably didn’t know he was making it. Shane pressed his face harder against Ilya’s ribs and Ilya’s arm tightened and Shane felt the room close to a point.

“Shane, look up.”

He looked up. Ilya looked down. Their faces were close. Ilya’s eyes were hazel and gold in the soft light, his lips parted, and Shane, who had spent years training himself not to look at Ilya like this in public, looked at Ilya like this in public. There was no discipline left to deploy. There was no version of his face that could see Ilya from three inches away and produce an expression suitable for general viewing. He was gone. He knew it. Ilya knew it. The camera knew it.

“Christ,” Ava said, very quietly, behind the camera.

She didn’t direct them. She didn’t need to. Ilya’s hand came up and cupped Shane’s jaw and tilted his face, and the adjustment was not posed but navigational, the instinct of a man who had memorised the angles of another man’s face and knew which one the light would find. Shane’s breath came out uneven. Ilya’s thumb brushed his cheekbone and then Ilya leaned down and kissed him. Not a staged kiss. Not for the camera. A press of his mouth to Shane’s, dry and brief and firm, and Shane’s hand came up to Ilya’s chest and his fingers spread over Ilya’s heart and Ilya pulled back an inch and looked at him and the look was the entire conversation.

The shutter fired in a long, sustained burst. No one in the room moved.

“Stay there,” Ava murmured. “Stay exactly there.”

They stayed. Foreheads together. Ilya’s hand on Shane’s jaw. Shane’s hand on Ilya’s chest. Ilya’s heartbeat steady under Shane’s palm. Shane closed his eyes. Ilya’s thumb traced the line of his jaw and Shane heard him whisper, barely a breath: “You are everything, my Shane.”

Shane swallowed. His fingers curled against Ilya’s skin.

“Perfect,” Ava said, from what sounded like a great distance. “Shane, t-shirt off now.”

Shane sat up. Pulled the t-shirt over his head. The air hit his skin, his shoulders, the back of his neck, and he was aware, suddenly, of how much of him was visible. He was not self-conscious about his body. Hockey had removed self-consciousness about bodies from his repertoire years ago. But this was different. This was not a locker room. This was a lit room with a camera, and his body was not being utilitarian here. It was being looked at. Seen. Offered.

Ilya, lying beside him, watched him with an expression he did not bother to arrange for the room. His eyes tracked Shane’s hands as they folded the t-shirt. Shane set it on the pillow, because he was not going to drop it on the floor in front of a photographer and a crew even if Ilya would have, and Ilya, reading his mind, smiled. The smile was private. It said: I know you. I know you fold things. I know you would fold a t-shirt during the apocalypse.

They lay facing each other. Side by side, skin against linen, bare chest to bare chest with six inches between them. Shane’s hand on the mattress between them and Ilya’s hand covering it. The light was warm and low. Ava moved quietly, shooting, not directing, letting them be.

Shane listened to Ilya breathe. They were close enough that he could count Ilya’s eyelashes, which was not a thing he was going to admit to anyone, least of all the man whose eyelashes he was most definitely not busy counting. Ilya’s fingers found his between the sheets and laced through them and the touch was hidden from the camera by their bodies and it belonged to no one but them. Ilya’s thumb stroked the inside of his wrist. Shane could feel his pulse meeting Ilya’s fingertip.

“Hi,” Ilya said, quietly. Just for him. As though they had just arrived somewhere together and were seeing each other for the first time that day.

“Hi,” Shane said.

Ilya’s mouth curved. “You are doing the thing.”

“What thing?”

“The thing where you look at me like you cannot believe I exist. You do it when you think I am not paying attention. I am always paying attention.”

Shane’s face heated. He pressed his forehead against Ilya’s collarbone. “Shut up.”

“Never,” Ilya said, and kissed his hair.

“I want a few of you laughing,” Ava said. “Can you give me that?”

“Shane,” Ilya said, in a stage whisper. “She wants us to laugh.”

“I heard.”

“Think of a funny thing.”

“That’s not how laughing works.”

“Okay.” Ilya considered. “Remember the thing with the fire alarm in Denver?”

Shane closed his eyes. “Don’t.”

“We were in the hotel and the fire alarm went off and you ran into the hallway in—”

“Don’t say it.”

“In your socks. Only your socks. Nothing else. And Hayes was in the hallway and he—”

“Ilya.”

“He said, ‘Hollander, I see you are ready for anything.‘”

Shane dropped his forehead against Ilya’s chest and laughed, helpless, his shoulders shaking, and Ilya wrapped both arms around him and laughed into his hair, and Ava’s camera went off in a rapid volley.

“Yes,” Ava said. “Yes. Give me more of that.”

“I have many stories,” Ilya offered.

“Please don’t,” Shane said, into Ilya’s collarbone.

Ilya kissed the top of his head. Shane looked up at him. Ilya looked down. They were both still smiling and the smiles were lopsided and their hair was mussed and the sheets were rucked and Shane thought: this. This was what the photos were for. Not the posed ones. Not the ones Ava directed. The ones in between, where they forgot the room and found each other and the camera caught them in the finding.

* * *

They dressed again for the interview. Not fully: Shane in a cream cable-knit cardigan over bare skin, Ilya in a clean white t-shirt. They sat on the floor of the den, on the rug, Ilya cross-legged and Shane beside him with his legs stretched out, their shoulders touching. Noor sat across from them in one of the returned chairs with the recorder between them.

“Let’s talk about Ottawa,” Noor said. “You’re both playing for the Centaurs now. How does it feel, being on the same team after years of facing each other?”

“Strange,” Shane said. “For the first few weeks it was like my brain couldn’t adjust. I’d see him in my peripheral vision and my instinct was still to compete with him, not to pass to him.”

“I had to yell at him,” Ilya said. “On the ice. I said, ‘Hollander, I am on your team, please give me the puck.‘”

“You said it in Russian.”

“I was stressed. I switch when I am stressed. He understood.”

“I understood the tone,” Shane said. “The words, no.”

“He is learning Russian,” Ilya said. “Slowly.”

“I know about forty words.”

“Forty-three. I count.” Ilya held up a finger. “He can order food. He can ask for directions. He can say ‘I love you’ and ‘where is the dog’ and ‘your hair is in my face.‘ These are the essentials.”

Noor grinned. “And how about the team dynamic? Ottawa’s having a historic season. A lot of people are calling this the best Centaurs team in decades.”

“The team is excellent,” Shane said. “It’s not just us. The young guys coming up are...” He searched for the word.

“Fearless,” Ilya said.

Shane nodded. “Fearless. They play like they’ve got nothing to prove and everything to give, and that changes the whole room. You can feel it in practice. There’s no ceiling.”

“Also we have excellent goaltending,” Ilya said. “I want to say this because our goalie will be upset if I don’t.”

“We have excellent goaltending,” Shane confirmed.

“And the atmosphere in the building has changed,” Ilya said, more quietly. “The fans. The city. People bring rainbow signs. I have seen children with rainbow tape on their sticks. This was not happening before. Ottawa decided to be a place where this is okay, and the fans decided too, and it is...” He paused. His English, which was fluent but occasionally reached a wall when precision mattered, stalled.

“Vazhno,” Shane supplied. “It’s important.”

Ilya looked at him. The look lasted a beat longer than it needed to.

“Yes,” Ilya said. “It’s important.”

“You’re learning Russian,” Noor said to Shane.

“Forty-three words.”

“That was forty-four,” Ilya said. “I think he is keeping secrets, knows more than he tells me.”

* * *

“The Irina Foundation,” Noor said. “Tell me about it.”

Ilya’s posture changed. He didn’t stiffen. He settled. Shane felt the shift in the shoulder pressed against his. Ilya’s face went calm and focused in a way that had nothing to do with performing and everything to do with purpose.

“The Irina Foundation is for mental health and suicide prevention,” Ilya said. “We raise money by running kids’ hockey camps in Ottawa and Montreal. We bring in NHL players, other athletes, people who volunteer their time. The kids come for hockey. They stay because someone listened to them.”

“And Irina?” Noor asked.

Ilya was quiet for a moment. Shane’s hand found Ilya’s knee and rested there.

“Irina was my mother,” Ilya said. “She battled depression for a long time. Without support. Without treatment. She died when I was twelve.”

The room went still. Noor’s pen stopped. Shane’s hand pressed harder on Ilya’s knee.

“Shane suggested we name the foundation for her,” Ilya continued, and his voice was steady in that particular way it became when he was choosing steadiness over the alternative. “When we launched it, at the press conference, I spoke about her. I had not planned to. But it was time.”

“His mom was the inspiration,” Shane added, after a moment. “My mom. Yuna. She’s the director and treasurer. Neither of us could imagine anyone better for it.”

“She is terrifying with spreadsheets,” Ilya said, and the faintest smile returned to his face. “I am afraid of her in the best way.”

“We’re looking to expand,” Shane said. “More cities. We’ve had interest from Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg. The model works because it’s simple: you show up, you skate, you talk. A lot of the kids who come to our camps have never had a conversation with an adult who asked them how they were doing and meant it.”

“What happens at the camps?” Noor asked.

“A week,” Shane said. He sat up straighter. This was where his brain lit up, where the systems and the structures and the planning that governed his life turned outward and became useful. “A week per city. We pair every kid with a mentor at the start, and the mentor stays with them the whole time. Same person. Consistency matters.”

“Most of the week is hockey,” Ilya said. “Real hockey. Drills. Games. They scrimmage and we ref and it is terrible and beautiful. Some of these kids have never been on a team. Some have never worn skates.”

“And we build in time for the harder conversations,” Shane said. “We bring in counsellors. Mental health professionals. The mentors sit with their kids and we talk about hard things. Pressure. Identity. What it feels like to not fit in. What it feels like to want to disappear.”

The room was quiet. Ilya’s hand found Shane’s between them and held it. His grip was firm.

“We had a kid last summer,” Ilya said, slowly. “Thirteen years old. Came to the Montreal camp. On the first day, she wouldn’t take her helmet off. Wore it the whole time. On the ice, off the ice, at lunch. Nobody asked her to remove it. Nobody pushed. On the third day, during the group talk, she took it off. And she said—” He stopped. Swallowed. “She said, ‘This is the first place where I didn’t feel like I had to protect my head from what’s inside it.‘”

Shane felt Ilya’s grip tighten. He held it back.

“That’s why we do it,” Shane said. “That kid. That sentence. That’s the whole thing.”

“Whose idea was the foundation?” Noor asked.

“His,” Shane said.

“Ours,” Ilya said.

Shane looked at him.

“You did the paperwork,” Ilya said. “I would never have done the paperwork. You built the whole thing. The structure, the sponsors, the website. I had the idea and you made it real. This is how it works with us. I dream it and he builds it.”

Shane didn’t know what to do with that. He looked at the rug.

“That’s generous,” he said.

“Is accurate,” Ilya said. “You are bad at accepting credit. This is your worst quality. Write that down too,” he told Noor.

* * *

“How has the league responded to you?” Noor asked. “As a couple. As teammates. As openly queer men in a sport that hasn’t always been welcoming?”

Shane took a breath. “It’s complicated. The league has been... some of the league has been good. The players’ association. Individual teams. There are people in every room we walk into who are glad we’re there. And there are people who aren’t.”

“We don’t pretend it’s perfect,” Ilya said. “When Shane was in Montreal, the coaching staff...” He paused. Chose his words. “There were difficulties. Things that were said. The way certain people made it clear that they were tolerating, not accepting. Tolerance is not acceptance. Tolerance is when someone stands next to you and wishes you were somewhere else.”

“Is Montreal the reason you moved to Ottawa?” Noor asked.

“Ottawa is the reason I moved to Ottawa,” Shane said. “The team. The culture. The opportunity to play with Ilya. I wasn’t running from. I was running toward.”

“Also the coaching staff in Ottawa are not assholes,” Ilya said.

“Ilya.”

“This is a queer magazine. I can say asshole.”

“You can say it anywhere. I’m questioning if you should.”

“I should. Some coaching staffs are assholes. This is a fact. Ottawa’s is not. Also a fact.”

Shane pressed his lips together. He wasn’t going to argue because Ilya was right, and the impulse to moderate the truth for public consumption was a habit he was still unlearning.

“Let’s talk about representation,” Noor said. “You’re the first openly queer married couple in the NHL, well apart from Scott Hunter and his husband, that is. Still, that’s a big thing.”

“It should not be a big thing,” Ilya said. “This is the point.”

“But it is. Right now, in 2022, it is.”

“Yes. And it shouldn’t be. And we will keep doing this,” Ilya gestured at the room, the cameras, the magazine, “until it is boring. Until two hockey players who are married is not a cover story. Until it is a paragraph on page forty.”

“He’s right,” Shane said. “The goal isn’t to be revolutionary. The goal is to be ordinary. To be two people who play hockey and are married and have a dog and argue about coffee, and for that to be unremarkable.”

“We are not there yet,” Ilya said.

“No.”

“But we are closer.”

Shane nodded. “We’re closer.”

“What would you say to a young queer athlete who’s reading this?” Noor asked. “Someone who’s in the closet, on a team, afraid to come out?”

Ilya looked at Shane. Shane looked at Ilya. Neither of them spoke for a moment, and the silence was not uncertainty. It was care. It was two people weighing words because the person they were speaking to deserved precise ones.

“You don’t owe anyone your truth before you’re ready to give it,” Shane said. “That’s the first thing. Your safety comes first. Your wellbeing comes first. Coming out isn’t a performance and it isn’t an obligation, and anyone who tells you otherwise doesn’t understand what it costs.”

“And,” Ilya said, “when you are ready. If you are ready. There are people like us on the other side of it. And it is better here.”

He said it plainly. No poetry. No embellishment. A man reporting what he had found.

“Not easy,” Shane added. “Better.”

“Better,” Ilya agreed. His hand found Shane’s on his knee, and their fingers laced together.

“What’s been the hardest part?” Noor asked. “Of being public. Of living like this.”

Shane was quiet for a long moment. He could feel Ilya beside him, waiting, giving him space without leaving.

“The constant awareness,” Shane said. “I already think about everything. I notice everything. How people look at us. What they don’t say. What they’re thinking behind what they’re saying. And now I notice it in high definition, all the time, because the whole world is paying attention and the whole world has opinions and some of those opinions are kind and some of them aren’t and all of them arrive in my pocket on my phone at all hours of the day.”

“He doesn’t read comments,” Ilya said. “I told him not to.”

“I read them once.”

“Once was too many.”

“Once was enough,” Shane agreed. “Now our agent handles all of that. I don’t look. But I know they exist, and knowing they exist is its own weight.”

“For me, the hardest part is different,” Ilya said. “For me it is knowing that I cannot go back to Russia. That the country I grew up in, the language I think in, is a place that would not accept this.” He gestured between himself and Shane. “My parents are gone. I have already said this about my mother. My father...” He paused. “Also gone. So when I stood at my wedding, in our backyard, with the river and the light and my husband in his grey suit, the most correct person I have ever seen, I was the happiest I have ever been. And also I was thinking: my mother never got to see this. She would have loved Shane. She would have been so proud. And she missed it.”

He stopped. The room was still. Shane’s hand tightened around Ilya’s.

“Shane’s parents were there,” Ilya continued. “David helped me get dressed. He put in my cuff links and he told me I was his second son. And I—” His jaw worked. “I had no family to bring. But his father said, ‘Your family is here,‘ and I understood, then, that this was also true for me. My family was there. It is Shane. It is his parents. There were close to a hundred people standing on a lawn. That is my family.”

Noor’s pen had stopped.

“I’m sorry,” Noor said. “For that loss.”

“I carry it,” Ilya said, and his voice was steady. “But I also carry what I have. And what I have is bigger.”

Shane’s throat ached. He brought their joined hands to his mouth and pressed his lips to Ilya’s knuckles, brief, firm, a gesture that said the things his voice couldn’t carry right now. Ilya’s fingers curled against his face and held.

“Moving on,” Noor said, gently.

* * *

“Tell me about Anya,” Noor said.

Ilya’s whole face changed.

It was instantaneous. A switch thrown. One second he was Ilya Rozanov, professional hockey player, measured and articulate in his second language, and the next he was a man whose dog was his favourite subject on earth.

“Anya is a rescue,” he said, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees. “Mixed breed, fluffy, small. She is blonde. She is beautiful. She has one ear that stands up and one that folds over, and the fold ear is my favourite ear.”

“You can’t have a favourite ear,” Shane said.

“I can. The fold ear is softer.”

“Both ears are the same softness.”

“You have not conducted the study. I have conducted the study. The fold ear is softer by a significant margin.”

Noor looked delighted. “How long have you had her?”

“A little over a year,” Shane said. “Someone abandoned her outside, in the cold. Our, I mean, Ottawa’s Social Media Manager’s family has a farm, and they found her and took her in. Ilya went to visit and came home with a dog.”

“She needed a home,” Ilya said, with dignity. “And I needed a dog. She put her paws on my shin and smiled at me. Dogs smile, you know. People say they don’t, but they are wrong. She smiled, and I named her Anya, and that was it.”

“I walked in and there was this little fluffy thing trotting between his legs and he was standing there grinning like he’d won the Cup. I said, ‘You dog-sitting for someone?‘ He said, ‘No. This is Anya. She is my dog.‘” Shane said.

“And then I showed him the toys.”

“He had bought like three dozen toys in one day. And a dog bed. And he’d already taken her to a dog spa for a bath.”

“She needed to be comfortable. She had been through a lot.”

Shane looked at Noor. “He slept on the floor with her the first night because she didn’t want to be alone.”

“She was scared,” Ilya said, as though this required no further explanation, and it didn’t.

“Does she have a preference?” Noor asked. “Between you two?”

“Me,” they said, simultaneously, and looked at each other.

“She sleeps on my side of the bed,” Shane said.

“She sleeps on his side of the bed because his side is closer to the door and she is a guard dog.”

“She’s not a guard dog. She’s scared of the vacuum.”

“She is a guard dog who has identified the vacuum as the primary threat. This is smart.”

“She loves Ilya more,” Shane said, and the admission was casual and dry and Ilya’s face did a thing that was both outrage and tenderness.

“She loves us equally,” Ilya said. “She shows it differently. With you she is calm. She sits on your feet and puts her head on your lap and is quiet. With me she goes insane. She sees me and she runs in circles and she cries. This is not love. This is mania.”

“It’s love.”

“It’s mania that looks like love. You are her safe person. I am her exciting person.”

“You’re everyone’s exciting person.”

Ilya paused. Tilted his head. A slow grin spread across his face.

“This is a compliment,” he said.

“It’s an observation.”

“It’s a compliment disguised as an observation and I accept it.” He reached over and took Shane’s hand. “Thank you, my Shane.”

Shane extracted his hand. Ilya took it back. Shane looked at Noor with an expression of practiced resignation that did not quite conceal the warmth underneath it.

“Quick-fire round,” Noor said, flipping to a new page. “Short answers. First instinct. Ready?”

“Ready,” Ilya said.

“Sure,” Shane said, who was not ready and would never be ready for anything requiring first instincts.

“Who’s the better cook?”

“Shane,” Ilya said.

“Me,” Shane said.

“He cooks. I eat. The system works.”

“What do you cook, Ilya?”

“Toast. Eggs. I can make eggs.”

“He made me an omelette once,” Shane said. “It was... it was an omelette.”

“It was a good omelette.”

“It was scrambled eggs shaped like a crime scene.”

“But it tasted—”

“It tasted fine.”

“Fine is a compliment.”

“It is not a compliment.”

“From Hollander it is.”

Noor was writing fast. “Last argument. What was it about?”

“The dishwasher,” they said, together.

“He loads it wrong,” Shane said.

“There is no wrong way to load a dishwasher.”

“There is a right way, and everything that isn’t the right way is the wrong way, and you put the mugs on the bottom rack.”

“The bottom rack has more pressure. Is more clean.”

“The bottom rack is for plates and bowls. The top rack is for mugs and glasses. The manual says this.”

“You read the dishwasher manual?”

“I read every manual.”

“This is true,” Ilya told Noor. “He reads every manual. When we got the car he read the manual before he started the engine. We sat in the dealership car park for forty-five minutes.”

“I wanted to know where the heated seats were.”

“There is a button. It is on the seat. It says ‘heat.‘”

Shane pressed his lips together. Noor was grinning so wide their pen had stopped moving.

“Most annoying habit,” Noor said. “Each other’s.”

“He leaves his toothbrush on the edge of the sink,” Shane said, without hesitation. “Not in the cup. On the edge. It falls off every night. Every single night. I hear it hit the floor at two in the morning.”

“It does not fall every night.”

“It falls every night.”

“And your most annoying habit?” Noor asked Ilya.

“He labels things.” Ilya looked at Shane with an expression caught between love and exasperation. “Everything. The spice jars. The storage boxes. He has a label maker and he uses it with, I think, joy? The label maker brings him joy.”

“Organisation brings me joy.”

“Last week he labelled the label maker.”

“I didn’t label the label maker.”

Ilya raised an eyebrow.

“I labelled the label maker’s case,” Shane said. “The case. Not the machine.”

Noor put down their pen and covered their face with both hands and their shoulders shook.

“Guilty pleasure,” Noor managed. “Ilya first.”

“Reality television,” Ilya said. “The one with the people on the island.”

“Love Island,” Shane said.

“Yes. Love Island. It is terrible and I love it. The people are so stupid and they find love anyway. This gives me hope.”

“For humanity?” Noor asked.

“For television.”

“Shane?”

Shane considered. “Celine Dion.”

Ilya went still.

“Don’t,” Shane said.

“I am not saying anything.”

“You’re thinking it.”

“I am thinking many things. All of them affectionate.”

“He has a Celine Dion playlist,” Ilya told Noor.

“It’s not a Celine Dion playlist, it has Celine Dion on it.”

“It has three Celine Dion songs.”

“Two.”

“My Shane. I was there. I counted.”

Shane’s ears went red. He stared at the rug. Noor looked between them and said, “There’s a story here.”

“There is a story,” Ilya said.

“Don’t you dare.”

“I would never.” Ilya put his arm around Shane’s shoulders and pulled him in, and his mouth against Shane’s temple said, “I would never tell them about the playlist, solnyshko,” quiet enough that the recorder wouldn’t catch it, and Shane elbowed him in the ribs.

“Big spoon or little spoon?” Noor asked.

“I am always big spoon,” Ilya said.

“He is always big spoon,” Shane confirmed.

“This is because I am bigger.”

“This is because you’re a furnace and I run cold.”

“Also because I am bigger.”

“You’re two inches taller.”

“Two inches and the wingspan of a condor.” Ilya spread his arms. “These arms were made for spooning. It would be a crime not to use them.”

“He can’t sleep unless he’s wrapped around something,” Shane said. “Before me it was a pillow.”

“Before you it was a sad life.”

“What would you be if you weren’t hockey players?”

“Engineer,” Shane said, without hesitation.

“Truly?”

“Structural engineering. I like knowing how things work. How they hold together.” He paused. “My parents thought I was going to do it for a while. I was good at physics.”

Ilya looked at him, interested, as though this were new information, which it wasn’t. Shane had told him this years ago, in a hotel room somewhere, probably Detroit, and Ilya had filed it and was now revisiting it in this context, weighing it, turning it over.

“Actor,” Ilya said.

Shane turned to him. “Actor?”

“Yes. I am very handsome and I have excellent range.” Ilya gestured at his own face. “This face can do comedy. This face can do drama. This face can do the thing where you look out the window and look sad.”

“That’s not acting. You do that on every road trip.”

“Yes, because the bus windows are dirty and it makes me sad. This is called preparation.”

“For what?”

“For my career in film. After hockey.”

“You can’t memorise your dentist appointment. How are you going to memorise a script?”

“Dentist appointments are not compelling. Scripts are compelling.” Ilya considered. “Maybe I would also be a chef.”

“You can’t cook.”

“I can learn. I have passion.”

“You have toast.”

“Toast is the foundation of all cooking. Every great chef begins with toast.”

“That’s not true.”

“It could be true. You don’t know every chef.”

“Each other’s worst on-ice habit,” Noor said, before the toast debate could escalate.

“He over-passes,” Ilya said. “He has the shot and he passes because he thinks someone else has a better angle. Nobody has a better angle. He has the best angle. But he passes.”

Shane’s mouth opened. Closed. This was, he knew, accurate. Accurate and specific in a way that required years of watching him play, and the precision of it caught him sideways.

“He cheats on faceoffs,” Shane said.

“I do not cheat.”

“You absolutely cheat. Your blade is over the line before the puck drops. Every single time.”

“My blade is near the line.”

“Near is over.”

“Near is near. Over is over. These are different words.”

“The refs seem to agree with me.”

“The refs are cowards.”

Noor made a noise that was half-laugh, half-cough. “Hidden talent. Something the other person does that would surprise people.”

Ilya looked at Shane for a long moment, and his face went through one of its shifts, the ones where amusement drained away and left behind a thing that was quieter, deeper, harder to look at.

“He draws,” Ilya said.

Shane went still.

“He doesn’t tell people. He has a sketchbook. He draws the view from hotel windows. The rink from the bench. Anya, sleeping. They are good. They are—” Ilya paused. “He sees things and he keeps them. In lines.”

Shane stared at the rug. His ears were burning.

“Shane?” Noor said. “What about Ilya?”

“He sings,” Shane said, to the rug. “Russian folk songs. In the shower. He doesn’t know I can hear him.”

“I know you can hear me.”

“You don’t know I can hear you because if you knew, you’d stop.”

“I would not stop.”

“You would stop because you’d be embarrassed.”

“I am never embarrassed.”

“You were embarrassed in Tampa when you walked into the wrong locker room.”

“That was not embarrassment. That was shock. The layout was confusing.”

“You sat down with the other team and started untying your skates.”

“I was committed to the bit.”

“There was no bit. You were confused.”

“Who said ‘I love you’ first?” Noor asked.

“He did,” Shane said, nodding at Ilya.

“I did.” Ilya didn’t pause. “I said it in Russian first. Many times. I was... murmuring it, without realising. And then I translated and said it in English and he froze.”

“I froze.”

“He froze. Like a computer that has crashed. He was not moving. He was not speaking. I thought I had broken him.”

“What did you say?” Noor asked Shane.

Shane rubbed the back of his neck. “I said, ‘Holy shit.‘”

Ilya closed his eyes. “‘Holy shit.‘ This is what I received. I pour my heart out in two languages and the love of my life says ‘holy shit.‘”

“And then I said it back.”

“After the ‘holy shit,‘ yes. He said it back. And I said ‘Thank Christ.‘ Very romantic. We are very romantic people, as you can see.”

“It was romantic,” Shane said, quieter. “It was the most romantic thing that had ever happened to me. I just didn’t have the right words at first.”

“‘Holy shit’ were the right words,” Ilya said. “I knew they were, because I knew you, and that is how you sound when you mean it.” He squeezed Shane’s shoulders. “So. ‘Holy shit’ was the right answer.”

“‘Holy shit’ was the right answer,” Shane said.

* * *

The final setup was the one Shane had been circling all day.

Ava wanted them stripped down. Not nude, but close. They changed behind a screen that Maren set up in the corner, and the screen was a kindness Shane noticed: the crew giving them a boundary they hadn’t asked for. Shane pulled off his jeans and stood in his boxer briefs, grey, plain, and felt the cool air on his legs and his stomach and the backs of his arms and the vulnerability of it was different from a locker room. In a locker room, a body was equipment. Here, it was editorial. It was going to be printed on glossy paper and slotted into a magazine that would sit on coffee tables and bedside tables and be held open with one hand.

He looked at Ilya. Ilya was in dark fitted boxer briefs and nothing else, and the overhead light from the softbox turned the planes of his chest into something geometric, each muscle throwing a shadow that gave his torso depth and architecture. The gold chain lay flat against his skin. The crucifix pendant sat in the hollow of his throat. The scar on his left side was a thin crescent. His body was a hockey player’s body: heavy through the shoulders, narrow at the waist, legs thick with years of skating. But it was also Ilya’s body. The body Shane slept beside and woke beside and pressed his face into when the world was too much. The body that had carried him off the ice when his ankle went during practice. The body whose breathing was the last thing Shane heard before sleep and the first thing he heard after.

Shane swallowed. Ilya caught him looking and raised an eyebrow.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You are staring.”

“I’m not staring.”

“You are staring at me in your underwear in front of a photographer. Very professional, Hollander.”

“Shut up.”

Ilya grinned. He reached out, hooked a finger into the waistband of Shane’s boxer briefs, and tugged him forward. It was a small gesture, playful, proprietary, and Shane went because Shane always went.

The room had been rearranged again. The bed was gone, replaced by a low concrete slab that Ava’s team had brought in, draped with a dark cloth. The lighting was dramatic: a single overhead spot and a fill light from the left, everything else in shadow. The wood panelling of the den wall glowed amber behind them. The rug was still on the floor, warm under their bare feet.

Maren had cleared out the extra crew. It was Ava, her assistant, Dev standing by in case of powder emergencies, and Noor, who had put their recorder away and was watching from the sofa with their folio closed. The room was small and warm and private in a way it hadn’t been before. The stripped-back crew changed the air. It felt less like a set and more like a room two people had stumbled into together.

“Lie down,” Ava said to Ilya. “On your back. One arm behind your head.”

Ilya lay down on the slab. The cloth was dark under him and his skin caught the overhead light and every line of him was visible: the ridge of his collarbone, the flat plane of his stomach, the trail of hair below his navel, the hard cut of his hips above the waistband. He looked up at the light without squinting.

“Shane, on your side, beside him. Propped up on one elbow.”

Shane lay down. The cloth was cool against his ribs. He propped himself on his right elbow and looked down at Ilya and Ilya looked up at him and the room dropped to a hush that was different from quiet. It was attention. Everyone in the room was attending to them and Shane could feel it on his skin like sun through glass.

Ava didn’t speak. She shot. Shane heard the shutter but not the direction, because there was no direction now. They had passed the point where Ava needed to tell them what to do.

Shane put his hand on Ilya’s chest. Ava hadn’t asked for it. Shane’s hand went there because that was where it lived. Ilya’s heart thudded against his palm. Steady. Solid. Ilya’s hand came up and covered Shane’s, pressing it flat, and his thumb moved across Shane’s knuckles.

Shane leaned closer. Not because someone said so. Because Ilya was below him and the light was low and Ilya’s eyes were dark, the pupils blown wide, and Shane could see himself reflected in them, a dark-eyed figure against a dark background, and the intimacy of seeing yourself in someone else’s eyes while a camera recorded it was a vertigo he had not prepared for.

“Can I touch your jaw?” Ilya murmured.

He was asking Shane, not Ava. In this room full of people, with a camera running, Ilya was asking permission.

“Yes,” Shane said.

Ilya’s hand came up and cupped Shane’s jaw. His thumb traced the line of Shane’s lower lip. Shane’s breath caught. The shutter fired. The room was gone. The magazine was gone. Ava and Noor and Dev were gone. There was Ilya’s hand on his face and Ilya’s eyes on his and the warm rough pad of Ilya’s thumb against his mouth and Shane’s whole body, which had been performing all day, performing ease and comfort and the public version of what they were, stopped performing.

“There,” Ava said, from what sounded like a great distance. “Right there.”

Shane’s eyelids dropped. Ilya’s thumb moved from his lip to his cheekbone, tracing, slow, and the look on Ilya’s face was naked. Possessive. Tender.

Ilya pulled him down. Ava hadn’t asked for it. Ilya’s hand on the back of Shane’s neck drew him in and their mouths met and the kiss was slow, open, Ilya’s lower lip caught between Shane’s, and Shane forgot the camera. He forgot the cloth under his ribs and the light above them and the cost of what they were doing, the glossy-paper permanence of it. He kissed Ilya because Ilya was below him and warm and his and Shane was so far past the point of moderation that the concept had lost its meaning.

The shutter fired. Neither of them heard it.

When Shane pulled back, Ilya’s eyes were soft, unfocused. His thumb was still on Shane’s cheek. He said, barely audible, “My Shane.” And then, in Russian, a sentence Shane didn’t fully understand but knew by sound: the thing Ilya said into his hair at night, the sentence whose meaning Shane had never asked for because the sound of it was enough.

“That’s the cover,” Ava said, quietly.

Shane didn’t hear her.

* * *

“Switch,” Ava said, after a beat. “Shane on your back. Ilya, above him. Same energy.”

Shane lay back. The cloth was cool against his shoulder blades. Ilya propped himself on one elbow above him, his body a canopy, blocking the overhead light so that his face was in shadow and Shane’s was lit. From below, Ilya was all angles: the line of his jaw, the column of his neck, the broad slope of his shoulder. His chain hung forward, the pendant catching the light, swaying between them. Shane could feel the heat of Ilya’s body above him without contact, a half-inch of air between them that was charged with warmth.

Shane reached up without being asked. His fingers slid into Ilya’s hair, the curls that Suki had tamed hours ago now back to their natural chaos, and Shane’s hand closed gently and Ilya’s eyes darkened, a reaction so fast and so honest that Shane felt it in his own chest.

He pulled Ilya down. No direction from Ava. Their foreheads touched and Shane could see nothing but Ilya’s face, the close map of it, the freckle near his left eye that only appeared in winter, the fine scar through his eyebrow from a stick in his first season, the soft line of his mouth. Ilya’s breath was warm. Their noses were side by side. If Shane tipped his chin up by half an inch they would be kissing and the room knew it and the camera knew it and the held breath of that proximity was, Shane understood, the photograph.

So he tipped his chin.

The kiss was different from the first. Slower. Ilya’s hand came to the side of his neck, fingers spreading into his hair, and the angle changed, deepened, and Shane’s other hand came up and pressed flat against Ilya’s ribs and he felt the expansion of Ilya’s breath against his palm. The kiss went on for three seconds, five, and then Ilya pulled back and looked at him and the looking was worse than the kiss. The looking was everything the kiss had said, stripped of the excuse of contact.

“You are making this very difficult,” Ilya said, low. “To be professional.”

“You started it.”

“You started it. You touched my hair. You know what happens when you touch my hair.”

“I know what happens when I touch your hair.”

“And yet.”

“And yet.”

The shutter fired in a long, sustained burst. Ava hadn’t said a word. She didn’t need to. She was capturing a conversation she couldn’t hear.

They did a few more. Ilya’s hand on Shane’s stomach, fingers spread, possessive. Shane’s hand in Ilya’s hair, pulling him down, their foreheads touching. A moment where Ilya’s mouth brushed the corner of Shane’s jaw and Shane’s breath went ragged and his fingers dug into Ilya’s shoulder and the shutter caught it. A moment where they lay on their sides facing each other and Ilya traced Shane’s collarbone with one finger, slow, mapping the line of it, and Shane closed his eyes and let him, and the room was silent except for the shutter and their breathing.

The shots were quick now. Ava knew what she had. She was collecting variants, angles, options for the layout team, but the photos that mattered had already been taken and everyone in the room knew it.

The last shot was on the rug, clothed again, Ilya sitting with his back against the wall and Shane between his legs, leaning back against his chest. They’d pulled clothes on carelessly: Shane in the cream cable-knit cardigan from the interview, open over bare skin. Ilya in his white t-shirt, stretched at the collar from being pulled on and off all day. Both of them looking at the camera. Shane’s face was calm. Ilya’s chin was on his shoulder and his arms were crossed over Shane’s chest and his expression, in the final frame Ava selected, was one Shane would later describe to Ilya in the car as victorious. As though he’d won a fight nobody else had known was happening.

“That’s a wrap,” Ava said.

The lights came up. The assistant started breaking down the softbox. Maren reappeared with bottles of water. Dev came over with a pack of makeup wipes and Shane took one and cleaned his face and the sharp chemical smell of the wipe was a relief, a return to the version of himself who was not being photographed.

Noor stood, tucked the folio under their arm, and crossed to them.

“Thank you,” they said. “Both of you. This was special.”

“Thank you for the questions,” Shane said. He meant it. Noor had stayed inside the lines and the lines had been generous enough to let in the real answers and Shane was grateful for that in a way he could not express without making it a speech.

“One more question,” Noor said. “Off the record, if you want. You don’t have to answer.”

Shane looked at Ilya. Ilya tilted his head, which meant go ahead.

“Five years from now,” Noor said. “Where are you?”

Shane opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

“Here,” Ilya said, before Shane could speak. “Together. Maybe retired. Maybe coaching. Maybe there are children, I don’t know. But here. The rest is details.”

He said it without looking at Shane. He said it to Noor, who had asked, but Shane heard it as if it had been said to him, and the simplicity of it went through him deep and straight, without resistance.

“That’s a good answer,” Noor said.

“Is the only answer,” Ilya said. He looked at Shane. “Unless you want to add.”

“No,” Shane said. His voice was rough. He cleared his throat. “No. That’s it.”

Ilya’s mouth curved. He reached over and took Shane’s hand and squeezed it once, and Noor smiled at them, and the recorder had already been off for five minutes, which meant none of this was going to print, which was, Shane thought, exactly right. Some things were for the page. Some things were for the room.

This one was for the room.

* * *

They drove home in Shane’s car. Ilya drove because Shane always drove and today had been enough without adding navigation to it. Competence, mild disregard for the speed limit, one hand on Shane’s thigh. Standard Ilya.

The streets were wet. It had rained while they were inside and the light from the storefronts bled across the asphalt in long bright smears. The wipers were off. The rain had stopped. The city in winter twilight was grey and amber and the buildings along Wellington had their lights on and Shane watched them pass without counting them.

“You okay?” Ilya said.

“Yeah.”

“You were quiet at the end.”

“I’m quiet a lot.”

“Different quiet.” Ilya glanced at him. Looked back at the road. “Thinking quiet.”

Shane watched the streetlights pass. Each one lit the dashboard for a half-second and then the car was dark again and then the next one came. He counted three of them before he caught himself counting and stopped.

“It was a lot,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Being looked at like that. For that long. By people I don’t know.”

“You did well.”

“I know. It’s just.” He rubbed his thumb against the seam of his jeans. “I keep thinking about what they’re going to use. What photos they’ll pick. How we’ll look.”

“We will look like us.”

“I know. That’s what I’m thinking about.”

Ilya’s hand found Shane’s thigh and settled. The weight of it was familiar, a coordinate on a map Shane navigated by feel. They drove through an intersection. A cyclist cut across in front of them and Ilya didn’t brake, just slowed. Adaptive. Unfazed. The same reflex that made him infuriating in traffic and excellent in net-front scrambles.

“The Noor question,” Shane said. “The five-years one.”

“What about it?”

“You answered first.”

“You were going to take too long. You were going to think about it and give a careful answer and it would have been good but it would have been the wrong one.”

“How do you know it would have been the wrong one?”

“Because the right one was simple and you don’t trust simple.”

Shane looked out the window. A man was walking a dog along the canal path, both of them hunched against the cold, the dog’s breath visible in the air. Shane watched them until they were behind him.

“I would have said the same thing,” he said. “I would have just taken longer to get there.”

“I know.” Ilya squeezed his thigh. “This is why I went first.”

They sat with that for a block. Two blocks. The heater hummed. Ilya turned onto the Parkway and the canal opened up to their left, dark and flat, the ice not yet thick enough for skating but close.

“You said children,” Shane said.

Ilya’s hand on his thigh didn’t move.

“You said ‘maybe there are children.‘ To Noor. On the record.”

“The recorder was off.”

“You didn’t know that when you said it.”

Ilya was quiet for a moment. He signalled. Changed lanes. His jaw worked, and Shane could see him choosing between Russian, which was where his real thoughts lived, and English, which was where they would need to arrive.

“We have talked about this,” Ilya said. “You and I. You have told me you want children. I have told you that you will be a good father. This is not new.”

“No.”

“But I have not said it where someone else could hear. And tonight I said it to a journalist in a room with a recorder.”

“Yes.”

“And this scares you.”

Shane rubbed his thumb against the seam of his jeans. “It doesn’t scare me. It makes it real. When it’s between us it’s a plan. When you say it in a room with a journalist it’s a... it’s a direction.”

Ilya looked at him. Looked back at the road. “I want that direction. I want to teach a small person to skate. I want to pack a lunch and get it wrong and have you fix it. I want Anya to have someone who drops food on the floor on purpose.”

Shane’s eyes stung. He looked at the canal.

“That’s a lot of wanting,” he said.

“I am a man of large appetites.”

“You want to pack a lunch.”

“I want to pack a bad lunch. This is important. The lunch must be bad so that you can fix it. This is how our system works.”

Shane laughed. It was thick and wet and he wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and Ilya pretended not to see, which was a kindness Shane did not have to ask for.

“We should talk about it properly,” Shane said. “At home. Not in a car. With timelines. And logistics.”

“You want to make a spreadsheet.”

“I want to make a plan.”

“You want to make a spreadsheet about making a plan.”

“Maybe.”

“This is why you will be the responsible parent and I will be the one who buys the Jet Ski.”

Shane snorted. “Hayden said that.”

“Hayden is correct for once in his life.”

Shane was laughing again, wet and helpless, and Ilya was grinning at the windshield.

They turned onto their street. The porch light was on, which meant the timer was working, which meant Shane had set it correctly before they left. The front window glowed. Shane could see the shape of the couch and the lamp he left on for Anya and, pressing against the glass, the pale smudge of Anya’s nose, watching them pull in.

Ilya parked. Turned off the engine. They sat in the car for a moment, in the quiet, the heater ticking as it cooled.

“I liked today,” Ilya said.

“Yeah?”

“The photos. You.” He turned to look at Shane in the dim light of the car. “You were beautiful today.”

“You said that already. At the shoot.”

“I said it for them then. I’m saying it for you now.”

Shane’s chest did its thing. The warm clutch. The small expansion. Ilya unbuckled his seatbelt and leaned over the centre console and kissed him, brief, dry, his cold nose against Shane’s cheek.

“Let’s go inside,” Ilya said. “The dog is making a face.”

Shane looked at the window. Anya’s nose was still pressed against the glass and her tail was a frantic blur behind her.

“She can see us.”

“Yes. And she is judging. Look at her face.”

“She always looks like that.”

“She looks like that when we are late. We are late.”

“We’re five minutes late.”

“In dog time, this is a century.”

Shane laughed, and it came out clean, no effort behind it, just the sound of a day that had asked a lot of him and found, at the end of it, that he had enough. He opened the car door. The cold air hit his face. Ilya came around the car and put his arm around Shane’s shoulders and they walked up the path together, their boots on the wet flagstone, their breath in the air, the porch light casting their shadows long and tangled on the ground ahead of them.

Ilya unlocked the front door. Anya greeted them with the whole-body enthusiasm that small fluffy dogs kept in reserve for the people they loved most, which was everyone but primarily these two. She turned in circles. She pressed her nose into Shane’s hand and then Ilya’s knee and then Shane’s hand again because she could not choose and would not be asked to.

Shane crouched down. Anya licked his face.

“Hey, girl,” he said. “We’re home.”

Ilya hung his jacket on the hook. Shane’s jacket went on the next hook, which had become Shane’s hook without discussion the week he’d moved in, and the house, which was theirs, with their sofa and their dog and Shane’s spice jars above the stove and Ilya’s toothbrush on the edge of the bathroom sink, took them back in.

Anya was vibrating. She pressed her nose into Shane’s palm, then Ilya’s knee, then circled back to Shane as if she couldn’t commit to a greeting order.

“Outside,” Ilya said. “She needs to run.”

He opened the back door and Anya tore across the garden like a dog who had been personally wronged by the concept of indoors. She made two full laps of the lawn before Ilya had even stepped off the porch, then skidded to a halt in front of him, panting, expectant.

“Yes, yes.” Ilya picked up the tennis ball from the basket by the door. “I know.”

Shane watched them through the kitchen window. Ilya threw the ball long and flat across the garden, almost to the river. Anya launched after it with the focus of an athlete who had one job and intended to perform it brilliantly. Ilya stood in the cold with his hands in his pockets, waiting, and when Anya brought the ball back he threw it again and scratched behind her ears while she dropped it at his feet and Shane thought: this is the man who sat shirtless on a concrete slab two hours ago and looked at me until a photographer called it a cover shot.

Shane opened the fridge. Chicken. Mozzarella. Parmesan. The jar of marinara he’d made on Sunday. Penne in the cupboard. His mother’s recipe card for Chicken Parmesan Pasta Bake was tucked into the front of his recipe binder, held in place with a paperclip. He’d been experimenting with it for weeks, trying to get the breadcrumb ratio right. His mother’s handwriting was small and precise and entirely without measurements, which meant Shane had to interpret “enough cheese” and “a generous handful of breadcrumbs” into grams, which was both infuriating and the closest thing to a treasure map his family had ever produced.

He set out the ingredients. Preheated the oven. Diced the chicken, mixed the breadcrumbs with grated parmesan, and boiled the water. The kitchen warmed as the oven came up to temperature and the motions were familiar, soothing, the domestic equivalent of a pre-game routine: knife, board, salt, oil.

When the prep was done and the components needed assembling, Shane tore a sheet from the notepad by the fridge and wrote out instructions. Step by step. Clear, numbered, specific.

1. Layer penne in the dish.
2. Chicken on top. Evenly spaced.
3. Marinara over everything. All of it.
4. Mozzarella. Torn, not sliced. Parmesan grated over the top.
5. Breadcrumbs and grated parmesan mix on top. Thin layer.
6. Oven, 200°C, 40 minutes. Timer is on the stove.
7. Do not open the oven to check. The cheese needs to brown.

He propped the note against the salt cellar and went to find Ilya.

Ilya was still in the garden. Anya had given up on fetch and was lying on her back in the grass, legs in the air, while Ilya rubbed her stomach with one socked foot. He looked up when Shane opened the door.

“Food’s prepped,” Shane said. “Instructions on the counter.”

Ilya raised an eyebrow. “Instructions?”

“Numbered.”

“You wrote me numbered instructions for putting a dish in the oven?”

“There are seven steps.”

“Seven?”

“If you skip step seven, the cheese won’t brown.”

Ilya looked at him for a long moment, and then his mouth twitched, and he said, “I will follow your instructions, Hollander. Every single one. I will treat them with the respect they deserve.”

“Thank you.”

“You are going to shower?”

“Yeah. I need...” Shane paused. “I need to decompress a bit.”

Ilya nodded. He understood what that meant. A day of being perceived, of managing stimuli, of performing a version of himself for a room full of strangers, had filled Shane’s capacity and the shower was how he drained it. Ilya never questioned it. He never rushed it.

“Take your time,” Ilya said. “Anya and I will handle dinner.”

“Anya is not allowed near dinner.”

“Anya is sous chef. She has earned this.”

Shane went upstairs. The bathroom was warm and the tiles were cool under his feet and he turned the shower on and let the water run until steam filled the room. He stripped, left his clothes in the hamper, and stepped under the spray.

The water was hot. It hit his shoulders and the back of his neck and he stood in it with his eyes closed and felt the day loosen its grip. The lights. The camera. The shutter. Ilya’s hand on his jaw in front of a room full of people. The sound of his own voice saying things he’d never said in public. The quiet after. All of it streamed off him with the water, not gone but settled, filed, put in its place.

He washed his hair. Conditioned it. Cleaned his body. And then, deliberately, unhurried, he prepped himself. He knew where he wanted the evening to end. He had known since the fourth setup, since Ilya had been above him on that slab with the light behind him and his eyes dark and his thumb on Shane’s mouth. He had known in the car when Ilya said you were beautiful today and meant it for him, not the camera. There was no rush. The evening would find its way there. Shane was making sure he was ready when it did.

He turned off the water. Towelled dry. His hair was damp and long against his neck. He dressed in joggers, soft, grey, and a worn t-shirt from a charity skate three years ago, and padded barefoot down the stairs.

The kitchen smelled like baked cheese and toasted breadcrumbs and the warm tomato-rich scent of marinara. Ilya was standing at the counter with a beer, reading Shane’s instructions, which were still propped against the salt cellar even though the dish was already in the oven and the timer on the stove was counting down.

“Step seven,” Ilya said, without looking up. “Do not open the oven. I have not opened the oven. The cheese is browning. I am a model student.”

“You set the table,” Shane said.

Two places. Across from each other. Napkins. Water glasses. A candle in the centre, lit. Shane looked at it.

“It is not an electric candle,” Ilya said. “This. A real candle.”

Shane looked at him. Ilya looked back. The candlelight caught the gold chain at his throat and the reference hung between them, quiet, warm.

* * *

They ate across from each other.

The Chicken Parmesan was good. Not perfect. The breadcrumb layer was uneven, thicker on one side where Ilya had rushed the distribution, and the pasta underneath was slightly overcooked because Shane’d been too generous with the boiling time. But the mozzarella had browned and the marinara was his mother’s and the kitchen was warm and Ilya ate with the focused appreciation of a man who had been raised on food that was fuel and had learned, through Shane, that food could also be a sentence.

They didn’t talk much. Shane’s fork clicked against his plate. Ilya’s beer bottle left a ring on the table that Shane noted and did not wipe. Their feet were tangled under the table, Shane’s bare toes against Ilya’s ankle, and the contact was constant, idle, an open line.

Shane looked at Ilya across the candle. Ilya looked back. It wasn’t charged. It wasn’t building toward a thing. Not yet. It was the look of two people who had spent a day being seen by strangers and were now seeing each other in private and the difference between those two acts was a canyon Shane could feel in his ribs.

“Today meant a lot to me,” Shane said.

Ilya set down his fork.

“Being in public. Together. Touching you in front of people and not having to—” Shane stopped. “For years I couldn’t look at you in a room without calculating who was watching. And today I looked at you in a room full of people whose entire job was to watch, and it was fine. It was more than fine. It was the best I’ve ever felt being perceived.” He paused. “Does that make sense?”

“Yes.”

“Do you feel the same?”

Ilya was quiet for a moment. He picked up his beer, put it down without drinking. His hand found Shane’s across the table, fingers lacing through, and he said, in Russian, a sentence that was slow and careful and carried the weight of a thought he’d clearly been holding all day.

Shane waited.

“I don’t know the English for it,” Ilya said. “The closest is... today I was not performing. I was not being brave. I was not being an activist or a symbol or a representative. I was just being with you, in a room, and the room let me. And the word for that feeling, in Russian, is...” He said it again. A single word. “It means something like, you belong here. You are among your own. Not a guest. Not tolerated. Belonging.”

Shane’s throat tightened. “I understand.”

“I know you do.” Ilya squeezed his hand. “This is why I married you.”

Shane squeezed back. The candle flickered between them.

* * *

They washed up together. Ilya washed, Shane dried, a rhythm they’d fallen into without ever negotiating it. The remaining pasta bake went into a storage container and into the fridge, labelled with a strip of masking tape on which Shane wrote Chicken Parm — Weds in black marker. Ilya watched him label it and said nothing, which was its own form of love.

The living room was warm. Ilya stretched out on the sofa, long and loose, one arm behind his head. Shane settled between his legs, his back against Ilya’s chest. The position was the mirror of the second photoshoot setup, the same arrangement of limbs, the same contact, except they were at home and alone on the sofa. Anya was on her bed by the fireplace, curled tight, already asleep.

Ilya turned on the TV. A game. Shane didn’t register which teams. His attention was half on the screen and half on Ilya’s hand, which had found its way under the hem of his t-shirt and was resting on his stomach, warm, heavy. Ilya’s thumb moved in slow strokes across his skin. Back and forth. Back and forth. The rhythm matched the clock on the broadcast.

“Bad power play,” Ilya said.

“Terrible.”

“The point man is in the wrong position.”

“He’s been in the wrong position all period.”

Ilya’s hand drifted higher. His palm spread across Shane’s chest, fingers wide, and Shane’s breath changed. Ilya’s thumb brushed his nipple. A light pass, almost accidental. Not accidental. Shane’s skin tightened under the touch and he pressed back against Ilya’s chest and didn’t say anything because the quiet was doing more work than words would.

On screen, someone scored. Neither of them reacted. Ilya’s thumb made another pass and Shane turned his head and Ilya’s mouth was there and they kissed. Slow. Shane’s hand came up to Ilya’s jaw and Ilya’s arm tightened around him and the kiss deepened and Shane turned in Ilya’s arms, rotating until he was on his front, pressed up against Ilya’s body, chest to chest, his weight on Ilya. The TV murmured in the background. Anya didn’t stir.

Ilya’s phone buzzed on the coffee table.

“Leave it,” Shane said, into Ilya’s mouth.

“Could be important.”

“It’s not.”

It buzzed again. Ilya reached for it without breaking the kiss, which was a coordination feat Shane would have admired if he’d been in a state to admire things. Ilya looked at the screen. They stopped kissing.

“It’s from Ava,” he said.

Shane pulled back. “The photographer?”

“She sent a link. Some selects, unofficial. Unedited.” Ilya’s thumb hovered over the screen. He looked at Shane. “Do you want to see?”

Shane’s stomach did a thing that was half anticipation, half terror. “Yeah.”

Ilya opened the link. The images loaded in a grid, small at first, thumbnails. He tapped the first one.

It was from the first setup. Both of them in the chairs, Ilya leaning in, Shane’s ears pink. The light was amber and warm and they looked, Shane thought, like two people who had been interrupted in the middle of a private conversation, which they had been.

The second was from the floor. Shane between Ilya’s legs, his head tilted back against Ilya’s shoulder, their fingers laced. Ilya’s mouth at Shane’s temple. The flannel shirt open. The light pooling around them. Shane remembered the Russian phrase Ilya had murmured against his skin and the memory of it went through him, live, electric.

The third: the bed. Shane’s cheek pressed to Ilya’s ribs, Ilya’s arm around him, both of them looking at each other with expressions that required no caption. Shane’s t-shirt still on, the white cotton bright against Ilya’s bare skin.

The fourth: both shirtless, facing each other on the linen, smiling, Shane’s forehead against Ilya’s collarbone. The one where they’d been laughing about the fire alarm. Their hair was mussed. The sheets were rucked. It looked like a photo someone had taken of two people who’d forgotten it was being taken.

And then the last two.

The fifth: Ilya above Shane on the slab, the overhead light cutting his face in half, Shane’s hand in Ilya’s hair, their foreheads touching. The half-inch of air between their mouths visible. Charged.

The sixth: the kiss.

Shane stared at it. He felt his chest open and his eyes sting and the air leave him in a long, unsteady breath.

In the photo, Ilya’s hand was on his jaw and their mouths were together and Shane’s hand was on Ilya’s chest, fingers spread over his heart, and the look on Shane’s face, the part of it visible above Ilya’s hand, was unguarded in a way that Shane had not known he was capable of being in front of a camera. It was the face he wore in their bedroom. In the dark. When nobody was looking.

And now everyone would be looking.

“Shane,” Ilya said.

“I’m fine.” His voice was rough. He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand. “I’m fine. It’s just—”

“I know.”

“People are going to see that.”

“Yes.”

“They’re going to see us like that. How we actually look. How we—” He swallowed. “That’s how I look at you. And everyone’s going to know.”

Ilya put the phone down. He took Shane’s face in both hands and his thumbs wiped the wet from under Shane’s eyes and he said, in Russian, the quiet words, the ones with the warm vowels, the ones Shane had heard a thousand times in the dark.

“Ya lyublyu tebya,” Shane said. The Russian was imperfect, the vowels too flat, the stress in the wrong place.

Ilya’s face broke open. Not a grin. A fracture. Joy coming through a crack.

He kissed Shane. Not slow. Not careful. He kissed him with both hands still on his face and Shane kissed him back with the taste of salt on his lips and the phone fell off the sofa and hit the rug and neither of them heard it.

Shane’s hands went to Ilya’s chest, his shoulders, the back of his neck. Ilya’s hands dropped from Shane’s face to his waist and pulled him closer, pulled until there was no distance, until Shane was pressed against him from hip to chest and the kiss was open and wet and graceless in a way that was beyond performance. Shane felt Ilya’s teeth against his lower lip. Felt Ilya’s fingers bunch in the back of his t-shirt and pull it up and Shane broke the kiss long enough to let Ilya drag it over his head and then they were back, mouth to mouth, Shane bare-chested, Ilya still in his shirt, and the imbalance was a voltage.

Shane pulled back. His breath was ragged. Ilya’s eyes were dark.

“Upstairs,” Shane said. “Now.”

He got up. Took Ilya’s hand. Pulled him off the sofa and Ilya came willingly, unfolding, tall, and Shane kissed him in the doorway of the living room, against the frame, Ilya’s back against the wood, Shane’s hands on his chest. Then they were in the hallway, moving, kissing, Ilya’s arm around Shane’s waist, Shane walking backward, and Shane’s heel caught the bottom stair and he stumbled and Ilya caught him and they both laughed, breathless, stupid.

“Smooth,” Ilya said.

“Shut up and come upstairs.”

“I am coming. You are the one who fell.”

“I didn’t fall. I tripped.”

“You fell. I caught you.”

They kissed on the stairs. On the landing. Against the bedroom door. Shane reached behind him and turned the handle and they stumbled through and Shane kicked the door closed with his foot and the sound of it shutting, firm, final, was the border between the day and the night.

* * *

The bedroom was dark except for the garden light coming through the curtains. It threw a stripe of amber across the bed and the floor and the chair in the corner where Shane had folded clothes that morning, a century ago.

They undressed. Shane pulled Ilya’s shirt over his head and tossed it at the chair. He missed. He didn’t care. Ilya’s hands were on his waistband, tugging the joggers down, and Shane stepped out of them and kicked them aside. Ilya’s sweats came off. The gold chain of his necklace caught the garden light. They stood in their underwear for a beat, breathing, and Shane hooked his thumbs into Ilya’s waistband and pulled and Ilya pulled Shane’s and they were naked and the air was cool and Ilya’s skin was warm and Shane pressed himself against it because warm skin was where he lived.

“Bed,” Shane said.

They fell onto it.

Not gracefully. Shane’s knee hit Ilya’s thigh and Ilya’s elbow caught the headboard and they both made sounds that were not sexy, and then they were laughing, tangled, Shane on his back, Ilya above him, their legs an unsorted mess.

“Ow,” Ilya said.

“Your elbow?”

“My elbow.”

“Want me to kiss it?”

“I want you to kiss other things.”

“Like what?”

“I will make you a numbered list.”

Shane laughed, and Ilya grinned down at him, and the grin softened, and Ilya’s hand came to Shane’s face and cradled his jaw and the laughter faded into the look that came after the laughter, which was better.

Ilya kissed him. His hand moved down Shane’s chest, his stomach, traced the line of hair below his navel, and then his fingers wrapped around Shane’s cock and Shane’s breath caught. Ilya stroked him. Slow. A tease. His thumb circled the head, spread the slickness there, and then his hand moved down again, long and deliberate, and Shane’s hips lifted off the bed.

“Slow,” Ilya murmured, against his mouth.

“I know.”

“Slow,” Ilya said again, and his hand matched the word. Long strokes. Patient. Shane’s fingers dug into Ilya’s shoulder and his breathing went ragged and Ilya kissed the corner of his mouth, his jaw, the tendon in his neck. Shane fumbled sideways for the nightstand. Pulled the drawer open. Found the bottle of lube by feel, because he knew where it was, because he had put it there, because Shane Hollander knew where everything in their house was at all times.

But before he could press it into Ilya’s hand, Ilya was gone. Down his body, mouth moving over his chest, his ribs, his stomach, and then lower, and then Ilya’s mouth was on him and Shane’s hand flew to Ilya’s hair and held.

“Fuck.” Shane’s head pressed into the pillow. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Ilya hummed around him, which was a dirty trick Ilya had perfected years ago and deployed without remorse. His hand was on Shane’s hip, holding him down, and his mouth was hot and slick and the suction was perfect and Shane’s vision whited at the edges.

“You need to stop,” Shane managed. “I’m going to—”

Ilya did not stop. Ilya, if anything, doubled down. His hand tightened on Shane’s hip and his head dipped lower and Shane’s fingers twisted in his curls and his back arched and he came with a sound that he would later deny making, something between a groan and Ilya’s name and a word in no language.

Ilya swallowed. Pulled off. Pressed his mouth to Shane’s hip bone. Looked up at him, and his lips were wet and his expression was disgracefully pleased with himself.

“I told you to stop,” Shane said, to the ceiling.

“You didn’t mean it.”

“I meant it.”

“Your hand was in my hair and you were pulling me closer. This is not the body language of ‘stop.‘”

Shane closed his eyes. His body was buzzing, boneless, his orgasm still rolling through him in long slow waves. Ilya crawled back up and kissed him and Shane tasted himself and didn’t care. Ilya’s body was warm against his, his cock hard against Shane’s thigh, and the contrast between Ilya’s want and Shane’s spent looseness was intimate in a way that penetration wasn’t. Ilya wanted him. Shane could feel how much. And Ilya was waiting, patient, kissing him with no urgency, his hand stroking Shane’s hair, his jaw, his shoulder.

Shane reached for him. His hand found Ilya’s cock and Ilya hissed and Shane started to stroke and Ilya’s hand caught his wrist.

“No,” Ilya said, between kisses.

“Let me—”

“I want to fuck you.”

The words filled the dark and Shane’s stomach clenched and the buzzing in his body found a new frequency.

“Yeah,” Shane said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

They kissed. Long. Slow. Ilya’s hand on Shane’s body, tracing. Down his side. Across his stomach. Up his chest. Not heading anywhere. Just mapping. Just reminding both of them of the landscape. Shane’s breathing steadied. His body warmed under Ilya’s hands. They kissed and the kissing was unhurried and Ilya’s mouth tasted of beer and Chicken Parmesan and Shane pressed into him and felt the gradual return of want, the slow rebuilding.

Ilya knew how long it took. He didn’t rush. His hand moved between Shane’s legs, cupping him, and his thumb stroked the sensitive skin behind his balls and Shane’s cock stirred against Ilya’s wrist. Ilya made a low sound of satisfaction and kissed him deeper and Shane felt himself harden against Ilya’s hand, slow, the arousal climbing back from a lower altitude.

They kissed for a long time. Shane lost track. Ilya’s mouth on his neck, his collarbone, the hollow of his throat. Shane’s hands on Ilya’s back, the muscles shifting under his fingers. At one point Shane said, “How did you not get hard during the shoot?” and Ilya laughed against his neck.

“By having very, very unsexy thoughts the whole time.”

“Same.”

“What were your unsexy thoughts?”

“Tax returns. You?”

“Dishwasher loading.”

“The correct method?”

“There is no correct method. This is my unsexy thought. The absence of a correct method.”

Shane laughed and Ilya laughed and the laughter was warm and stupid and Shane was hard now, fully, Ilya’s hand working him with the same patient rhythm, and the transition from laughing to gasping was seamless, the border between them nonexistent.

“Now?” Shane said.

Ilya reached for the lube. Slicked his fingers. His hand slid between Shane’s legs and Shane let his knees fall open and the first finger was slow and careful and Shane’s breath left him in a rush.

“Good?” Ilya asked.

Shane nodded. Ilya’s finger moved inside him, a slow curl, and Shane’s hand found the sheet and gripped. The second finger followed, and Shane breathed through the stretch, the familiar fullness, and Ilya watched his face and read it and adjusted and Shane felt his body open around Ilya’s hand and the relief of it, the sweet dull ache of being filled, was the feeling that shut his brain off at the mains.

The noise stopped. The thoughts stopped. There was Ilya’s hand and Ilya’s breath and the dark ceiling and the stripe of light from the garden and the slow, devastating press of Ilya’s fingers inside him, and Shane Hollander, who managed everything, stopped managing.

Ilya withdrew his fingers. Shane heard the click of the bottle again. Felt Ilya’s hand on his thigh, spreading him, and then Ilya was there, the blunt pressure of him, and Shane looked up and found Ilya’s face above him in the half-dark.

“Ready?”

“Yes.”

Ilya pushed in. Slow. Glacial. A long, continuous slide that filled Shane by degrees, and Shane’s mouth opened and his eyes closed and his hands came up to Ilya’s arms. Ilya stopped. Full. Inside him. Their hips flush. Shane could feel the heat of him, the pulse of him, and the intimacy of it was overwhelming, not the sex but the stillness, the held breath, the two of them joined and motionless in a dark room with the garden light across the bed.

Ilya’s forehead came down to Shane’s. Their noses brushed.

“Hi,” Ilya said.

Shane laughed. Breathless. “Hi.”

Ilya began to move.

Slow. Long, deep strokes that Shane felt in his whole body. His heels pressed into the backs of Ilya’s thighs. His hands moved from Ilya’s arms to his back, fingertips pressing into the muscles along his spine. Ilya’s breath was warm on his mouth and their faces were close, foreheads touching, and every thrust was a full sentence.

“I love you,” Shane said. The words came out without planning. No processing. No thirty seconds of silence. Just the truth, bare, delivered from a body that had stopped thinking and started speaking.

“I love you,” Ilya said. His voice cracked on the you. “You are—Shane, you are so—”

He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to. His hips rolled and Shane gasped and Ilya’s hand found his jaw, the same hold from the photoshoot, thumb against his cheekbone, and Shane turned his face into the touch and kissed Ilya’s palm.

The rhythm built. Not fast. Deeper. Ilya shifted his angle and Shane felt it, the white-hot press against the spot inside him, and his breath left him in a sound that had no consonants. Ilya did it again. Again. Shane’s hand found his own cock, hard and leaking between them, and stroked in time with Ilya’s thrusts and the dual sensation was a circuit completing, current running through him from both directions.

“Beautiful,” Ilya said, above him. “You are so beautiful. Today. Now. Always.”

Shane couldn’t speak. His body was taut and trembling and Ilya was inside him and above him and around him and his orgasm built from deep in his body, deeper than the first, a pressure that gathered behind his navel and spread through his hips and his thighs and his chest and when it broke it broke him, a full-body shudder, his cock pulsing between them, come hitting his stomach and his chest and Ilya’s chest and his hand on Ilya’s back dug in and his mouth opened on a sound that was raw and wrecked.

Ilya watched him. Ilya watched him through the whole thing with dark eyes and parted lips and when Shane’s body clenched around him, Ilya’s hips stuttered and his composure fractured and he thrust hard, twice, three times, and came inside Shane with his face pressed against Shane’s neck and a sound that was Shane’s name in Russian.

They breathed.

The room was quiet. The garden light soft. The cooling sweat. Ilya’s weight on him, heavy, warm, the gold chain pressed between their chests. Shane’s hand was still on Ilya’s back. Ilya’s face was still in Shane’s neck. Neither of them moved. The stillness was its own communication: I’m here. I have you. Stay.

Ilya lifted his head. Kissed Shane’s mouth. Soft. Gentleness after intensity.

“You okay?” Ilya asked.

“Yeah.” Shane’s voice was wrecked. “Yeah. I’m okay.”

Ilya pulled out carefully. Shane winced, and Ilya kissed his jaw in apology, and rolled sideways. They lay on their backs for a moment, side by side, breathing, staring at the ceiling.

Ilya reached for the tissues on the nightstand. He cleaned Shane’s chest, his stomach, gentle, thorough. Then his own. The tissues hit the bin. Ilya lay back down and Shane rolled against him and pressed his face into Ilya’s chest and Ilya’s arm came around him and they lay tangled, breathing, Shane’s brain slowly powering back up like a building after a blackout. The thoughts returned one at a time. The room. The bed. The soreness. Ilya’s heartbeat under his cheek, still fast, slowing.

Minutes passed. Five. Ten. Shane pulled the duvet over them both and Ilya’s arm tightened and the warmth rebuilt and the room was dark and quiet and full.

A whine at the door. Soft, insistent. The sound of claws on hardwood.

“Your turn,” Shane murmured.

“My turn.” Ilya sighed. He kissed the top of Shane’s head, extracted himself from the tangle, and padded naked across the room. He opened the door. Anya trotted in, tail wagging, and jumped onto the bed and turned three tight circles at the foot of it before curling into a ball with her nose under her tail.

Ilya came back. Climbed under the duvet. Shane pressed against him, face in his chest, and Ilya’s arm settled across his back.

“Goodnight, Anya,” Ilya said.

Anya sighed.

“Goodnight, Shane.”

“Goodnight,” Shane said.

The house was quiet. The garden light made its stripe across the bed. At the foot of it, Anya breathed in the slow, even rhythm of a dog who had her people exactly where she wanted them.

Shane closed his eyes.