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1: My Feet are Aching
Ilya was six when he experienced his first seizure.
He had been playing outside like normal, with his brother Alexei, when suddenly he just fucking dropped. The beautiful sunny day turned into a moonless night, and then when the sun came back his mother and brother were hovering over him worriedly.
Ilya’s movements had felt sluggish, disconnected, wrong as he tried to sit up. His brother had carried him back into the house. His mother and father argued heatedly inside, the latter insisting he had just gotten a bit overheated on the summer day while the former demanded she take Ilya to the hospital. To his father, going to the hospital for anything less than life-threatening was a sign of weakness. Ilya was pretty sure that if one of them ever broke a bone, he’d set it with a homemade splint and tell them to sleep it off.
His mother had yelled, then. It was the only time Ilya ever saw her stand up to his father with such ferocity. She sat in the waiting room, by Ilya’s side, with an angry red imprint on her cheek.
The doctors ran some tests, figured out that Ilya had epilepsy. He had to stay overnight, and his mother stayed with him. Ilya could only imagine how angry his father was that they hadn’t come home, and he spent the whole night worried about his brother. He had two more seizures, which the doctors said could be from elevated levels of stress. They assumed it was stress from being kept in a hospital, but he and his mother knew better.
They discharged Ilya the next morning with anti-seizure medication that he took dutifully every day, and his mother just as dutifully got refilled each time he ran low. Ilya never found out what had happened to his brother that night, alone with their father, but while they were still friendly and played together, their relationship had permanently changed. While the death of their mother may have been what broke Alexei and Ilya apart for good, years later Ilya will look back on this moment as the event that formed the first crack.
~*~*~*~
2: And Your Back is Pretty Tired
In all the chaos of moving to Boston, Ilya forgets, for a little too long, to establish care with an American doctor.
He had been off the anti-seizure medication since he was sixteen, the absence of seizures for nine years making his doctor believe his epilepsy may be in remission if not gone for good. The doctor had monitored his condition regularly and stressed the importance of finding a new practitioner in Boston to take over the job, but the invincibility complex of a typical teenager had caused the to-do item to fall very low on his list.
It’s why he shouldn’t be surprised when, after a particularly hard practice, he collapses in the locker room.
Ilya had been feeling sluggish all practice but had pushed through from a combination of assuming it was no big deal and wanting to prove himself as the hotshot he was made out to be to his new team. He had been slower in the locker room afterwards, too, taking his time in the shower. He supposes he should be grateful it didn’t happen in the shower, as he could’ve cracked his skull on the tile and/or drowned in the shallow water while not in control of his body. Instead, it happens while he is half-dressed, he and Marleau the only two lingering behind. Ilya wonders if Marleau sensed something off with the Russian rookie, had been waiting for something like this to happen when he vaguely senses Marleau beside him as he writhes on the floor. He hears, distantly, Marleau on the phone with emergency services.
Ilya tries to tell him when it’s over that this is no big deal, that this has happened to him before. He must say it in garbled Russian because the concern on Marleau’s face deepens instead of abating at his words. Ilya has another seizure as they load him into the ambulance.
When he comes back into awareness for real, after sleeping it off in the hospital, Marleau is there with his coach and the team doctor. The secret comes out, and his coach chews him a new one for not finding a new physician in Boston and taking better care of himself. The team doctor writes a referral to a good local physician specializing in the care and treatment of epilepsy. Ilya swears all three men into silence, begging them not to tell any more of his teammates, their management, the world. They agree to keep his condition locked down, as long as he maintains treatment. Sharing the burden of his secret should feel like a lightness on his shoulders, but instead it weighs him down further, remembering an old phrase of how two people can only keep a secret if one of them is dead.
~*~*~*~
3: We’ve Drunk a Couple Bottles, Babe, and Set Our Grief Aside
Getting back on his anti-seizure medication stops the potential for any future episodes, and after four years of drug-assisted remission, Ilya starts to believe this condition is something he can halfway forget about, only remembered each morning when he takes his pills.
He senses something might be wrong when he leaves the bathroom in Vegas, at the 2014 NHL Awards, after promising Shane Hollander that he will later, maybe, do something more than suck his dick. He chalks it up to the pheromones buzzing through his system, channeling in and out of his own member that has blessedly stayed soft enough to avoid detection.
As he watches Shane pleasure himself on Ilya’s bed in the penthouse suite, he gets the idea that might be more than sexual energy. However, he is determined to fuck this man he has been ignoring for six months before letting whatever is going to happen, happen.
Ilya reaches his goal with two spectacular climaxes— one per person— but then Shane wants to stay and talk. Ilya knows he is running out of time. He keeps his answers short, clipped, hoping Shane will eventually get the memo. He verbally shoves Shane out the door, not even getting up from the bed, not even kissing Shane goodbye despite so desperately wanting to. He only has enough time to snub out his cigarette after the door clicks shut before his muscles are locking up, making him a prisoner in his own bed.
Once the episode is over, he drags himself to his bottle of pills, counts them three times to make sure he did not forget his dose this morning. He didn’t. He retrieves his phone and schedules a visit with his doctor as soon as he can before leaving for Russia.
~*~*~*~
4: And As the Earth Burns to the Ground . . .
The reappearance of his seizures takes more from Ilya than he thought his epilepsy would ever have the right to take. His doctor sends him to Russia that summer with a new supplemental medication to take on top of the pills he already has, hoping they will stop the episodes that are now coming semi-frequently. They do, for almost exactly a year, until they don’t. His father and brother walk in on him in the midst of having seizures twice, looks of disgust painted on their expressions.
By the time the 2015-2016 season is in full swing, Ilya and his doctor experiment with different doses, different medications, to try to get the seizures back under control without further intervention. He has been very lucky not to have a seizure during a game, though he does excuse himself from practice at times to ride through an episode privately. Since his coach knows, he doesn’t give Ilya shit for it, but his teammates spear him with some curious glances every now and again. Marleau does his best to stop the lines of questioning before they begin, as if Ilya is not able to take care of himself.
He has also lost his ability to drive, a demand from his doctor due to the very real safety concern of having a seizure while behind the wheel. His sports cars sit abandoned in his garage, so he starts letting Marleau borrow them on rotation to keep them in good working order. Ilya lets second-year player Gus Connors in on the secret, because Ilya clocked him as a pretty cool, well-mannered guy, and he needs another teammate on his side. Plus, the car custody thing is easier with two teammates to alternate through his collection.
He does not, however, tell Shane. Just because they have been hooking up for nearly six years doesn’t make this relationship anything more than casual, as much as Ilya’s stupid heart would like it not to be. And letting Shane in on the condition which only a handful of people on this continent know about is decidedly not casual. Though the seizures have not stopped, they follow a somewhat predictable pattern. Ilya has a handful a week, give or take, so it’s not debilitating or obvious enough that anyone else needs to know. He has a couple close calls with Shane, but he deals with them coolly, quickly, and out of sight so that the other man doesn’t notice anything amiss. If he sleeps a little bit harder on these nights, Shane doesn’t say anything.
His worst stretch of time is after Shane comes over to his apartment in November 2016 and leaves suddenly once they call each other by their first names, followed by Shane very publicly dating movie star Rose Landry. Ilya is sick with jealousy, as well as something else. The night he sees Shane in the nightclub with Rose, he has a seizure in his apartment and cries in the shower. He chalks the emotion up to this uncontrollable condition which he has started to think of as a disease.
His doctor begins talking about alternative treatment methods, citing the stress of his job as too great to overcome through medication alone. Ilya knows it’s not just the pressure of hockey, but he nods along as if that’s the reason his heart is breaking in a way no X-ray or CAT scan will ever be able to see.
A ketogenic diet is suggested and tried, but Ilya cannot follow it. He enjoys his junk food too much, and cutting out simple pleasures like normal bread throws him into a funk more than any side effect from his lineup of medications. They find out the parts of his brain causing his epilepsy are too entwined with his basic functions to be able to cut into cleanly without a high risk of debilitating lifelong consequences. Especially with his hockey career, which requires a high level of metal and physical coordination, even small changes from messing with his brain could have catastrophic effects.
By the time Ilya goes to Tampa for the 2017 All-Stars, he and his doctor have begun debating the merits of different devices they could implant in different parts of his body that could reduce seizures, weighing in the risks of them getting damaged while being knocked around the ice. It wears Ilya out, the medical discussions in his second language and the careful planning of offseason times Ilya could go under the knife. Not to mention the ever-present thoughts at the back of his mind about Shane Hollander and Rose fucking Landry.
So the Florida weekend where Shane admits that he and Rose were not compatible, that he likes Ilya and is “completely gay,” is a balm to his senses. Playing on the same team as Shane gives him a high like none he has experienced in a long time. He doesn’t have a seizure once, even when he opens up to Shane about his family and cries on his shoulder about it.
His episodes calm a bit after that, though they don’t disappear. They never disappear. They sink back to the point that Ilya thinks maybe he could manage without surgery, even through the stressful week that is the death of his father. This is, until March 2017 when he watches Shane, the love of his life— he has admitted this to himself now, though never out loud and certainly not to Shane— go down on the ice after an accidentally brutal hit from Marleau.
His adrenaline keeps him stable until Shane is lifted out of the rink and into an ambulance, after which point he bolts to the locker room and has a seizure so brutal he almost passes out on the floor after it subsides. Marleau and Connors find him, thankfully, and he has to admit some things about he and Shane that he’s sure the other man would not love. Not that they’ve been fucking for seven years, but that they actually like each other. That they are somewhere in the weird, nebulous space of more than friends.
His coach benches him for the rest of the game at the team doctor’s request, both citing private medical concerns. He tries to brush it off as a minor concussion to his team, when he was caught on the outskirts of the fray during the fight after Shane’s hit and got a stray punch to the chin. Ilya doesn’t know if they buy it. He doesn’t care.
He doesn’t sleep much that night, watching sports news clips and scrolling his phone constantly for any updates on Shane. Every now and then, his exhaustion will drag him down into a fitful sleep, but it doesn’t last long. In the morning, Marleau shows up in one of Ilya’s sports cars to take him to visit Shane, and Connors sends him a text asking Ilya to pass on his well-wishes to Hollander. Ilya is so grateful to have stumbled into friendships with two great, accepting people in the hyper-masculine and often fucked-up hockey world.
Shane winds up being okay, minus a broken collarbone and a real concussion of his own, and that is the thought Ilya clings to for the rest of the day and really throughout the rest of the season. He doesn’t dwell on the invitation to Shane’s cottage, even though he wants to, knowing that the other man was too high to take that seriously. Even when Shane asks him again, over text and fully lucid, he brushes it off with another non-committal answer. It’s not a yes or a no, because Ilya knows he cannot say yes. But he’s still figuring out how to say no to Shane.
The first thing Ilya does when Scott Hunter kisses his boyfriend on the ice is call Shane and tell him he’s coming to the cottage. The next thing he does is contact his doctor and push his surgery date till the end of July.
~*~*~*~
5: Oh, Boy, It’s You . . .
The seizure comes out of nowhere.
Shane and Ilya are relaxing in bed at Shane’s cottage, two mornings after telling each other “I love you” for the first time. At least, the first time in English, on Ilya’s part. It was shaping up to be the perfect day on top of an already-perfect week.
He feels the telltale signs, the sensation that his body feels off, somehow, and knows he doesn’t have long. He can’t escape into the bathroom this time. He has to prepare Shane.
Why, during the most blissful time of his life, did this have to happen now?
“Shane,” Ilya says, cupping both cheeks and staring into his half-groggy eyes.
“Hm?” the other man responds lazily.
“Listen to me carefully, Shane. I am about to have a seizure.”
“What?” Shane bolts upright in bed, now completely alert.
“It’s okay.” One of Ilya’s hands had fallen when Shane sat up, but he uses the other to stroke around his ear. “I have had them, before. I have epilepsy.”
“You’re . . . ? But . . . ?”
“Do not call ambulance,” Ilya commands. “Not unless it lasts for longer than 30 seconds or I hurt myself. And don’t touch me unless it looks like I might. Or if I start choking, roll me over on my side.”
Shane is drifting, going inside that space in his head which Ilya knows means he is dissociating and freaking out. He needs him present right now. He tugs once on his earlobe, sharply but not harshly. He snaps back to attention.
“Please,” Ilya says. “I need you. I’m sorry. Just . . .”
His hand slips from Shane’s face as his body constricts from head to toe. Whatever thought he’d been in the middle of flies straight out of his brain.
When he comes back into himself, the first thing he notices is Shane’s worried face, staring at the watch on his wrist to Ilya and back again. Then, he feels the bead of drool leaking from the corner of his mouth but is still too disconnected from his hands to wipe it away. Gross, Ilya thinks. As if this could be any less romantic, now he’s slobbering like a dog.
Ilya blinks a few times, banishing the last bits of fog from his brain, and Shane’s eyes catch his in his sweep of watch-Ilya-watch.
“Hey,” Shane says softly, wiping the trail of spit from his mouth. Ilya feels the way his thumb trembles against his skin. “Hey, can you hear me? Are you okay?”
Ilya’s head lolls to look at him more directly, see the worry in his eyes. It stabs right through to his heart. He made Shane feel like this. He had let Shane see one of his darkest secrets, one he’d held so closely, all because he’d gotten too careless, too comfortable. And now Shane would never look at him the same way again.
“I’m sorry,” Ilya mumbles, but Shane shushes him immediately.
“No, Ilya. You don’t have anything to be sorry for. You can’t control it. Do you need anything?”
“Water,” he croaks. Shane nods, kisses his forehead, and disappears from the room. A minute later, he hears the kitchen sink running.
While Shane is gone, Ilya’s body comes back to him in pieces, stretching and flexing out the soreness from his locked muscles. He stumbles over to his backpack in the corner of the room and fishes out his bottles of pills. He hasn’t taken his medication yet this morning, but he knows it hasn’t been long enough to consider it a missed dose or to trigger this.
That knowledge makes him want to throw something at a wall and then bash his head into it repeatedly. It doesn’t matter what he tries. Doesn’t matter if he identifies all potential triggers and does his best to avoid them. The seizures creep up on him anyway, turning something beautiful into something ugly. There’s no way Shane will want him to stay, after this. This thing they built is so fragile, so new. They had just declared their love to each other. This, on top of everything else, would just be too much.
Shane returns to the bedroom just as Ilya finishes propping up the pillows on his side and leaning back into them in a seated position, legs beneath the covers. His pill bottles sit on his lap, a garish orange against the dark blue sheets.
He hands Ilya the water, which he gulps down half of almost immediately. He settles on the bed next to Ilya’s knees, looking at the bottles.
“Are these . . . ?”
“My epilepsy medications? Yes. I take them every morning, to stop the seizures.”
“Did you—“
“No. Sometimes they just happen, medication or not.”
“Oh.” Shane glances back up at him, then. “For how long?”
“Most of my life.” Ilya can’t bear the weight of being seen by Shane, so he trains his eyes on the far wall. “Since I was six.”
He hears the other man gasp, but he tries to ignore it and swallow the lump in his throat. He chases it with his dose of pills and some water. Shane watches him carefully the whole time.
“Is there anything you can do?” Shane asks. “To . . . stop them?”
This is the question Ilya has been waiting for. He hears it as, Can’t you do anything to make yourself more normal?
“Maybe,” Ilya snaps, his resentment towards himself sneaking into the conversation. “I have tried every medicine in the book. They are calling it drug resistant, now. They want to put a little device in my skull, but no, Shane, they may not ever go away. I have to live like this, and you will, too, if . . .”
He can’t finish his sentence. If you stay. Ilya wants him to stay, in his own masochistic way, but he knows that is a lot to ask. Of anyone, but especially his perfect Shane, who has put up with so much from him. Who will have to put up with so much more just by being in a gay relationship in a sport that maybe will not accept him. Add in the epilepsy, and the reasons for him to leave, to Ilya, seem insurmountable.
“Hey.” Shane leans in close, takes the water glass from his hands and sets it on the nightstand, runs his fingers through Ilya’s hair. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m here with you, no matter what. It’s okay if you can’t get them to stop. I just want you to be okay.”
Ilya sighs before Shane connects their lips, kissing him so gently Ilya could melt into the bedsheets. He clutches Shane’s waist with hands still too light for their size.
“When is your surgery?” Shane murmurs against his mouth when they pull apart slightly to breathe.
“Hm?”
“You said you have a surgery coming up, to put something in your skull to help with the seizures. When is it?”
Ilya knows what’s coming, can tell by the determined set of his face. “Shane. I could not ask that of you.”
“You’re not asking. I’m telling. When. Is. The surgery.”
“Late July, in Boston.”
“And how long will you be in recovery?”
“A few days in the hospital, and then a few weeks before I can be at home by myself. Then 6-8 weeks after the surgery, they will clear me to be back on the ice.”
“Okay.” Ilya can practically see the calculations taking place in Shane’s mind, surprisingly complicated for someone who Ilya knows is bad at math. “First thing’s first, we need to call your doctor to see if we can move up your surgery date.”
“What?” Ilya leans back farther into the pillows. “Why?”
“Because eight weeks will put you right at the end of September.” Shane says this like it’s obvious. “You’ll miss the pre-season training build, and then you’ll be trying to catch up for the rest of the season. Which . . . absolutely not. You’re not working overtime after brain surgery.”
“Is not that bad, Hollander.” Truthfully, he hadn’t done the calculations well enough on his own to realize how a late-September release could cut into hockey; he was just thinking about how the season wouldn’t be started yet, so he should be good.
“They are putting a device in your skull, Ilya. It’s brain surgery. Why did you schedule so late into the summer? You could’ve done it in June and been healed in plenty of time.”
“I did schedule it for June, at first,” he hedges. A flush creeps up his neck. “But then I changed it.”
“Why the fuck would you do that?”
“I would’ve had it yesterday.”
“But…” The pieces click. Ilya sees it. “Oh, my god. You changed the date of your brain surgery to come to the cottage?”
“It was a really good offer,” Ilya laughs weakly.
Murder. That’s what Shane’s going to do to him. He doesn’t have to worry about changing the date of his surgery, because he will be buried beneath the cottage floorboards in the next 24 hours.
Shane closes his eyes and breathes deeply through his nose. Ilya kind of wishes Shane would just blow up on him, call him an idiot, and move on.
“Okay,” he finally declares. “After we call the surgeon and get your date moved up—“ Ilya opens his mouth to argue, but Shane levels him with a glare— “I will book a plane ticket to Boston. We’ll stay in your apartment until you’re cleared to be on your own.” Shane pauses. “Unless you don’t want me there.”
“Yes, most beautiful man in hockey ready to drop everything and be there for me after surgery, waiting on my every need,” Ilya deadpans. “Sounds like hell.”
“Shut up.” Shane grimaces. “I just didn’t want to intrude. In case you had other plans . . .”
“My other plans were to be an invalid in my own home for a month while Svetlana checks to make sure I am not dead. This is better plan.”
“Well, yeah. Because I made it.”
The full weight of what Shane just promised to do hits him: he wants to stay by Ilya’s side in Boston, for four whole weeks, taking care of him after brain surgery a month (or maybe less) after they made things official. Ilya feels himself choking up like he did when Shane confessed the ten-year plan he’d made in the middle of the night for them, just so they could be together. He surges forward, capturing Shane’s mouth with his own. The kiss is fiercer this time, with Ilya pouring into it all the things he can’t bring himself to say: you mean everything to me. Asking— no, demanding to take care of me, to be by my side, is better than giving me the world. You are my world.
Shane pulls back too soon. “I don’t want to wear you out.”
“I wouldn’t mind,” Ilya says lazily, nipping on Shane’s bottom lip.
Shane moans, but then he clears his throat. “Well, I kind of need you well rested. Because there’s one more thing we have to do.”
“Which is?”
“We have to tell my parents. About us.”
Ilya studies him. “You’re going to tell your parents you are fucking arch rival?”
“Well, I’m not going to say it like that,” Shane huffs. “But yes, I should probably tell them that I’m gay. And that we’re . . . together. If that’s okay.”
“You would do this?” Ilya asks, tracing Shane’s freckles. “For me?”
“I would do anything for you.”
Goddammit, Ilya’s going to cry. Ilya cannot cry right now.
“We don’t have to tell them about your epilepsy,” Shane adds quickly. “We can tell them you have an old injury that needs surgery to be treated properly, and you have to be under constant supervision for a while. I just can’t disappear to Boston for a month without them raising some serious questions. They might put out a missing person’s report if I don’t tell them something.”
“You can tell them about my epilepsy, Shane.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” he replies. He wants Shane to be honest with his parents. He’s not ready to scream about it for the rooftops, but he’s tired of lying. Maybe being honest will make him feel like less of a burden to the people he loves.
“Hey.” Shane kisses his cheek, then his forehead, carding his fingers through his curls. “I love you.”
“I know,” Ilya says softly. “I love you, too.” It doesn’t make him feel less horrible, but he does feel less weighed down. It’s something.
~*~*~*~
+1: . . . That I Lie With
After they discharge him from the hospital, Shane makes him a veritable nest of pillows and blankets on his couch. He had tried to put him to bed, but Ilya resisted, wanting to be closer to Shane. Even if he was asleep, it was easier to rest knowing he was near where the action was, where Shane would undoubtedly be flitting around his apartment cleaning, making meals, anything he thought he could do without waking Ilya.
The surgeon had told him he would need to sleep on his stomach for the first two weeks while the incisions healed, but Ilya had bitched about it enough that Shane found a special pillow online that allowed him to sleep on his back without disturbing the incision.
He settles into the pillows, including the special one, breathing out a contented sigh. The painkillers make sure he doesn’t feel anything, but his head has felt strange since coming out of surgery. He’s not sure if he can actually feel the device in his skull or if it’s all placebo.
Ilya stretches his arms out. “Come here.”
“I don’t want to hurt you,” Shane says.
He groans dramatically. “Hollander.”
Shane acquiesces, carefully folding himself over the length of Ilya’s torso and along his body. Ilya strokes along his back and messes up his hair.
“This is best medicine,” Ilya declares. “Better than drugs.”
He kisses Ilya’s pec through his shirt. “Rest, you asshole.”
The other man complies, quickly falling asleep with the feeling of Shane’s warmth on top of him.
When Ilya next awakens, it’s with a jolt. He remembers a dream— no, a nightmare— of being left alone. Now he has a blanket tucked up against his chin, but none of what he really wants. And his head is fucking killing him.
“Ugh,” he moans. Even the sound of his voice is too much for him, and he whimpers.
“Ilya?” he hears from somewhere in the apartment. It’s distant enough, through the pounding in his head, that he’s not sure if he imagined it. He moans again.
Suddenly, he feels the warmth he was missing pressed against both sides of his face, steadying his head. He doesn’t know when he closed his eyes. An angel is whispering sweet things to him.
“Shh, Ilya,” the angel murmurs. “Shh.”
Something cool and damp presses against his forehead. “I think it’s time for your next dose of medication.”
“No.”
“Yes.” He’s being propped up slightly as pills are passed through his lips, followed by a glass of water. He takes just enough to make the pills go down and lets the angel lie him back down against the pillows.
Slowly, with the angel rubbing his chest, his shoulders, his head, Ilya’s awareness comes back to him. He blinks open his eyes to see Shane hovering over him, a thin layer of concern covering a thick blanket of love on the other man’s expression.
Ilya tears up. It’s horrifying, but he can’t stop it.
“I’m sorry,” he weeps. “I’m sorry I’m such a burden.”
“No, Ilya, no,” Shane murmurs. “Why do you think that?”
He sees his father, in his mind’s eye. His brother.
“Useless,” his father says. “If you can’t get this under control, how will you manage to play hockey?”
“Of course it’s too much for you,” his brother sneers. “You’re never around anyway— you’re only good for your money. And now, you won’t even have that.”
Ilya shakes his head. He can’t let Shane know. He has to stay strong, to push through this on his own.
“You are too soft, just like your mother,” his father says. “It will kill you like it killed her.”
Shane wipes his tears away, and then he’s kissing Ilya, the most featherlight pressure against his mouth, his cheeks, his forehead.
“You’re not a burden,” Shane repeats. “I want to be here. I love you.”
“I love you, too.” Even though I shouldn’t.
The next time Ilya wakes up, his feet are propped on Shane’s lap. Shane stares at his laptop screen, his cute little reading glasses propped on the bridge of his nose. He’s reading something— Ilya can tell by his look of intense concentration.
“What are you doing?” Ilya mumbles, wiping the sleep from his eyes.
Shane breaks out of his trance. “Good morning, sunshine.”
“Is it morning?”
“Uh, no.” He squints at the laptop screen. “It’s actually 5 p.m.”
“Close enough.” Ilya winds their fingers together, playing with Shane’s.
He sets his laptop on the floor next to the couch with his free hand. “How are you feeling?”
“Hm. Maybe like someone cut into my skull.”
“So, normal, then.”
“Yes. This is a perfectly normal feeling.” When Shane’s nose scrunches, he adds, “I am not in any pain, Hollander.”
“Good.” Shane rubs Ilya’s kneecap, studies it like it’s the most fascinating thing in the world. “So. I’ve been doing some research.”
“Very dangerous.”
“Shut up. Have you ever tried a ketogenic diet?”
“Not this again,” Ilya groans.
Shane raises his eyebrows. “Again?”
“Doctor tried it a couple years ago,” he explains. “I couldn’t do it. Unlike some people, I eat carbs.”
“Fuck you, I eat carbs.”
“You eat bad carbs. Boring ones,” Ilya says. “Let’s give device next to my brain chance to work, okay?”
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Shane agrees. “We need to give the neurostimulator a chance to work before we start adding other things into the mix.”
“It may take a while.” Ilya swallows. “A long time. Years, maybe. Lots of follow-up visits. It’s a lot of work.”
“I know,” he says. “Why do you keep doing that?”
“Doing what?”
“Saying things like you’re trying to scare me away.” Shane leans down and kisses the back of Ilya’s hand where their fingers are still joined. “I’m not leaving. Not unless you want me to.”
“Of course I don’t want you to,” Ilya says. “But I don’t want you to put your life on hold for me, either.”
“Did you ever think,” Shane huffs, “that maybe I want to be here? That maybe I like taking care of you?”
“Oh, this is what you want,” Ilya replies, his tone joking but the words behind them serious. “To have sick boyfriend to mother hen over. Fulfill your quota of charity work.”
“You’re not sick,” he insists. “You have a seizure disorder. You can’t change it, and you can’t control it. It’s no different than me needing glasses to read.”
“Such sexy glasses,” Ilya purrs.
“And if I got LASIK to correct my vision, would you put up with me telling you it’s bad to watch over me while I recover?”
“I would chain you to the bed,” Ilya declares. “You would never be able to leave.”
“Good luck with that, asshole. You’d have to get me there first.” He snorts. “Plus, you’re getting me out of a couple brand deals I really didn’t want to do.”
Ilya gasps. “I am a bad influence on you.”
“The worst.”
“I suppose epilepsy is good for some things,” he concedes. “Like getting boyfriends out of things they don’t want to do.”
“You know, there’s this charity gala in December I’m really not looking forward to . . .”
“Let me know when, so I can put it on my calendar. I will make sure I have seizure on that day. Big one.”
Shane frowns. “You better never intentionally trigger yourself.”
“Don’t worry, it will be fake,” Ilya promises. “It will be very convincing, though. I am good at faking it.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Shane says innocently. “You’ve never faked it with me.”
“Pervert. Not my fault you have such good mouth.”
“Oh yeah? How good is my mouth?”
“Hm, I don’t remember specifics.” Ilya grins wickedly. “Maybe you should come over here and jog my memory.”
“Not a chance,” he says. “No sexual activity until after the first follow-up visit.”
“Is hardly an activity if I just lie back and watch.” He strokes his free hand over the crotch of his sweatpants.
Shane laughs. “Like you could ever be a pillow princess.”
“Pillow princess?” Ilya gasps. “Who has taught you this word?”
A bright red blush blooms across his freckles. “I told you, I’ve been doing some research.”
“I see.” Ilya switches which hand sits on the split of his pants, pulling the one still attached to Shane’s over it instead. “And what else did your research say?”
Shane leans in close, like he’s going to kiss him. “It said . . .”
“Mmm . . . ?”
“. . . that it’s probably time for another cold compress.”
Shane disentangles himself from Ilya, headed toward the hallway. Ilya groans loudly and throws a small pillow tucked in by his side at the other man’s head.
“I fucking hate you!”
“No, you don’t!” Shane calls back.
And he really doesn’t. He’ll still hate himself, some days, and this disorder that sometimes holds him back. But if Shane doesn’t hate him, and he doesn’t hate his epilepsy, maybe Ilya can learn to be okay with it, too.