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"You know, I think this place re-did its bathrooms after last season. The water pressure in the shower sucks now."
"Hmm, let me know if you want sponge bath instead."
Shane had spent a lot of time in hotel rooms with Ilya over the years, but playing together now for the Centaurs made everything feel different, not just the shower at the Fairmont. It was the tail end of their first road trip of the season and they were in a hotel room in Pittsburgh, sitting up on the bed shoulder-to-shoulder. They were on the second night of a back-to-back and both of them were both wiped out but still a little too wired from a close win to go to sleep. Shane was watching the late game, Edmonton at Seattle, while Ilya looked down at his phone and scrolled through Instagram.
"Seattle's power play already looks better," Shane said. Ottawa had played out in Seattle last week and beat them easily, but he could see from how they were moving on the ice tonight that they'd figured out they were doing too much hot potato with their passing.
"Who cares?" Ilya replied without looking up. "We do not play them again until springtime, and by then McCann will probably be hurt. That guy cannot stay on the ice to save his life."
"I know, right?" McCann was supposed to be Seattle's top player, but he spent enough time on IR that Shane thought he should just build a vacation home there. He shook his head. "I think his ribs are made of porcelain."
Ilya hummed in agreement. He absently put one hand on Shane's thigh and used the other one to keep scrolling on his phone. Shane could see that he was watching a reel with what looked like two drag queens interviewing people on the street. He'd said over the summer that now that they were out it was safe to let his algorithm get more gay, which didn't really make sense to Shane but it seemed to make Ilya happy.
Shane kept watching the game. A few minutes later, Seattle sent in their fourth line and Ilya looked up and nodded at the screen. "Oh, I forgot to tell you about that rookie Crozier," he said. "Is like us, I think."
"Like gay?"
Ilya tilted his head like he was thinking it over. "Could be bisexual or something. One of those alphabet letters."
Shane was still so bad at being gay. Every time he thought he had a handle on all the alphabet letters, it seemed like they added another one. Maybe he needed to figure out how to also get a more gay algorithm.
"Right, yeah," he said. "So, what makes you think that about Crozier?" He was curious, but not really questioning. Ilya loved to crow about how he had known Shane was gay before Shane had figured out he was gay. But even aside from that, he really did have uncanny gaydar. It was fucking annoying.
"When we played in Seattle last week, I saw him … looking. But not in the bad way."
"Huh, why didn't you tell me?"
Ilya shrugged. "I meant to tell you after the game," he said. "But then we got back to the locker room and the dog hotel had sent those pictures of Anya in the bee costume and I forgot."
"Seriously?"
"She was so cute!"
Ilya looked back down at his phone, probably so he could pull up the live cam at the dog hotel. Shane watched Crozier on the screen and frowned when he whiffed on a pass from his left wing. Seattle had taken him midway through the second round, but what Shane had seen so far had left him unimpressed.
"Anyway, Crozier. Do you really think he's, like, queer?" Shane knew it was a good umbrella term, but half the time he still felt like he was going to get in trouble for saying it out loud.
"I think so, yes. He was being kind of obvious about it." Ilya snorted, and then said, "Maybe he is not even in the closet? Disappointing rookie on a rebuilding team, maybe no one cares enough to ask him anything."
Shane couldn't decide if a kid being able to come into the league openly gay and kind of bad at playing professional hockey was great or awful. Mostly, it was hard to imagine. "You really think it's like that?" he asked.
"Who knows? Kids now, they come out at, like, twelve and bring boyfriends to prom."
"Okay, grandpa." He briefly wondered how Ilya even knew what a prom was. Maybe from watching American movies. He probably knew as much about proms as Shane did; he'd skipped his own end-of-year formal because he'd been at tryouts for World Juniors. "So, Crozier, do you think we should try to talk to him?"
"Why, so we can ask him for threesome?"
"Oh my god, no, of course not," Shane groaned. "Among many other reasons why that is not going to happen, we just established that he's a literal child." Not technically true; he was pretty sure Crozier had been drafted out of college. But now that Shane was on the wrong side of thirty, all the rookies looked like children to him.
"Older than you were when I got my hands on you." Ilya gave him a knowing look. Right now he was shirtless and only wearing trackpants, and he looked as good as he had when he'd started getting his hands on Shane when they were nineteen.
Shane smiled at the thought but didn't hesitate to push back. "Yeah, when you were also a literal child, asshole."
"Lies. I am Russian, I was never that young."
Shane watched as the gameplay transitioned to a car commercial, but his thoughts drifted back to earlier in the conversation and then he wasn't thinking about Crozier or the game anymore. He knew he could let it end there and spiral in his own head for a while, but he was trying to get better about not doing that.
That being said, the way that he tried to convey what was going on in his head was kind of unfortunate. "You know, I have actually done a threesome before."
Ilya put his phone down on the nightstand and turned to him, eyes wide and gleeful. "Oh really?" he said before parrotting Shane's own words back at him. "You have 'done threesome.'"
"Ugh, fuck off. Had a threesome. You know what I mean."
"No, I do not know what you mean, you have never told me this!" He slapped his hand on Shane's thigh. But because it was Ilya, he didn't seem offended that Shane had kept this secret from him. He looked like a kid who'd been handed an extra present on Christmas morning. He was always excited when it turned out there was still something new for them to learn about each other.
So for that reason, Shane kept talking. "I know I'm, y'know, me," he said, gesturing at himself, "but I'm still a well-known professional athlete. You kind of have to actively try to not have a threesome at some point."
"True, true." Ilya reached over to tug at the string of Shane's hoodie. "So tell me about this time, when you did not actively try to not have threesome."
Shane sighed, but he knew that he wouldn't have brought it up if he wasn't going to let Ilya drag the whole story out of him. "Fine," he said. "I'll tell you, but I'm warning you now. This is not going to be, like, a sexy bedtime story."
Ilya gave him a look, like he shouldn't underestimate his ability to make anything sexy. Which was fair enough, but Shane was pretty confident this story would be the exception that proved the rule. He reached over to nudge Ilya's knees apart, and he let them fall open cross-legged so that Shane could slide down and drape himself across his lap, his head resting on Ilya's thigh. He was still facing the TV but no longer paying attention to what was happening on the screen.
"It was my second year in the league," he said, "and the other guys dragged me out somewhere after a game. In Vancouver, I think? There were these two girls who clearly wanted to go home together with me. And I just felt like it would be too weird if I didn't go along with it. The other guys, they never would have let me hear the end of it. It just … it seemed like that would have been bad for me." He winced a little bit. Back then, he'd cared a lot more about trying to fit in with the other Voyageurs.
From this angle, he couldn't see Ilya's face, but he could picture his narrow-eyed look. Ilya said, "Are you ready to talk yet about how it is true that all your teammates in Montreal were huge pieces of shit?"
Shane briefly squeezed his eyes shut. He was getting close to being able to admit that some parts of his time in Montreal had not been … great, but right now it still felt like sliding his tongue over the space where a tooth was missing.
Ilya was not conflicted; his anger at the Voyageurs remained incandescent. He'd confessed a couple of weeks ago that he'd even talked about it with Galina. "I don't think you're supposed to waste your time talking about my problems during your therapy appointment," Shane had joked. But Ilya had looked very serious and said, "Everything that is about you is about me."
"Not all of my teammates," Shane said weakly. "I don't know. Let's try again in another month."
Ilya leaned down to kiss the top of Shane's head. "Okay, moya lyubov. Continue with threesome story, please."
"Ugh. So I left with them. The two girls, I mean. I probably should have made up some kind of fake emergency before we got back to the hotel. But I guess, I don't know, I wanted to try and be that guy."
Ilya rubbed his hand back and forth across Shane's shoulder but stayed quiet. He basically lived to give Shane a hard time, but he also always seemed to know when it was the rare moment that he needed to shut the fuck up.
"We went up to my hotel room. And it was … not good, obviously," Shane said, which was like saying that Crozier's crossovers were a little bit sloppy. Understatement of the century.
Before he kept going, he actually laughed a little bit. Because it had been so, so bad. He'd expected it to be twice as awkward as having sex with one girl at a time, but it had been exponentially worse. The two sets of hands had made him feel overstimulated and clammy, and trying to divide his attention between two different people had made him feel like he was back on the ice. Both of them had been wearing a lot of perfume, and the clash of their flowery scents had been like a headache.
Still, he tried to spare a kind thought for 20-year-old Shane, who had been in bed with two eager and attractive women, thinking about whether he could get up and surreptitiously pull the fire alarm. Who'd believed that meant he just hadn't found the right girl yet. What a fucking idiot.
He twisted himself around so he was looking up at Ilya's face. "I tried to make it work," he said finally, "But after a while, I told them that I, uh, that I wanted to watch the two of them together. So that way I could just jerk off and think about … something else."
Ilya's eyes lit up again, looking mischievous. "You mean think about me?"
Shane bit his lip and inhaled sharply."Well, yeah," he said. "I didn't have a whole lot of material to work with at that point, but you've always been pretty memorable."
"Of course."
"Anyway, the worst part is that I don't think either of them were into girls like that?" Shane knew that he wasn't the most observant guy in the world, but he was very familiar with what it looked like to touch a girl's breasts like they were a pair of unripe cantaloupes. "So after it was over, I felt kind of awful about making them do stuff with each other," he said. "Like I was taking advantage of them or whatever."
That was the biggest reason he'd shoved this story down and tried not to think about it for ten years. He felt bad that he'd dragged two innocent bystanders into his whole weird sex crisis and might have made them do something they hadn't wanted to do. That part was kind of skeevy.
"No, no," Ilya scoffed. "You were tiny innocent baby! If anything, horny puck bunnies were taking advantage of you."
"Hey, I wasn't that innocent. You of all people should know that."
"Shane, please. You said this was your second year in the league? Early days. I had not yet converted you into being a total sex freak."
Shane shook his head, even though Ilya was annoyingly right about all of it. "So, yeah," he said, "that's my very embarrassing threesome story. Everybody had a bad time and all three of us probably wished we were getting railed by Ilya Rozanov instead."
The whole thing had kind of petered out after he'd managed to shoot his load, and the girls had left without a fuss. The next morning, the other guys had tried to hound him for details, and he'd made a weak joke about how he didn't kiss and tell. But then, thankfully, someone had gotten a news alert about how a player on the Scouts had been arrested for drunk driving and then nobody had cared about Shane's night anymore.
Ilya leaned down and pressed a kiss to Shane's forehead. "I wish I had been there," he said, sounding wistful.
Shane rolled his eyes. "Oh, I'm sure."
"No, not like that. Or, maybe a little bit like that. But I always wish I had been there when you were having bad sex. All those times, I wish you had been having good sex with me."
Shane's cheeks flushed. Nobody but his husband could retroactively insert himself into a disaster threesome and also say the absolute most romantic shit in the same sentence. "Well," he said, "I think you've more than made up for it."
It was the truth. The number of times he'd had sex with Ilya definitely exceeded the total number of times he'd had sex with anyone else combined. Honestly, that had probably been the case since, like, 2014. He wondered if the same would ever be true in reverse. Maybe if they fucked a lot, for the next forty years, until their knees gave out and their dicks stopped working.
There was a time when the lopsided ratio might have made him feel intimidated, but now it just sounded like a pretty good way to spend the rest of his life.
***
Ilya ran his fingers through the hair at the nape of Shane's neck and let his mind wander. He was bored with Instagram and didn't really give a shit about a late October matchup between two mediocre teams who played in the Western Conference. He thought about closing his eyes and cooking up a daydream involving Shane and two beautiful girls, but it was hard to imagine this scenario without his extremely gay husband looking like he was being led to the execution chamber.
A few years ago, a conversation about sex and girls would have led to Shane asking if Ilya missed sex with girls, but maybe everything that had happened this year had dulled the edges of Shane's insecurity a little bit. He stayed sprawled across Ilya's lap but had already twisted himself back around so he could return to watching the game.
"Do you think Dubois is going to ask for a trade?" Shane asked. "They're probably gonna get stuck in the middle of the division this season and he's still got a couple years left on his contract."
"He should. Everyone on that team should ask for a trade. Edmonton has worst arena in the league. Everywhere you go, it always smells like feet."
Ilya didn't miss girls. A while back, there'd been a moment when he had been laughing along while his teammates talked about sex with their wives and girlfriends and hookups, and he'd realized that there had been a last time he'd ever slept with a girl and he didn't even remember the details.
After the All-Star Game in Tampa, he'd stopped getting together with any of his regulars, either at home or on the road, and had tried not to think about what he was doing. There'd been a handful of unsatisfying one-off hookups in the months leading up to his father's death, but they all blurred together and he had no clear memory of which one had actually been the last. Then for a few months there had been no one, and then in the biggest and best surprise of his life, there had only been Shane.
His thoughts skipped forward to a much more memorable encounter, and he chuckled a little bit to himself.
"What are you laughing about?"
"I was thinking, do you remember that first time I had lunch with Yuna? When I still played in Boston."
A couple of months into his last season with the Bears, Yuna had texted to say that she would be in town for a meeting with Gillette and asked him if he wanted to have lunch. He had gently reminded her that they couldn't risk being seen together in public, but she'd been undaunted and had suggested having lunch at his apartment instead.
Shane flipped over onto his back, looking up at him and smiling. "Right, yeah. You were so nervous!"
"Oh, extremely. But I also remember thinking, 'Wow, first time in such a long while I have invited a beautiful woman over to my place and it is Yuna Hollander.'"
Shane jabbed his elbow into Ilya's stomach. "Gross. You realize that when you say it like that, it sounds like you were trying to hook up with my mom."
Ilya laughed again, delighted with the opportunity to wind Shane up. "Yes, I should be so lucky! Yuna is very gorgeous lady, very--"
"Oh my god, you asshole. Shut up."
He thought back to that day Yuna had come over to his Back Bay penthouse apartment. He remembered being jittery, and glad that they only had an hour between the time he would get home from morning practice and when she would need to leave for the airport. He'd asked the cleaning service to come over for an extra mid-week visit and had pestered Shane about what his mother would like to eat.
The meal had started out awkward. But eventually they'd talked about Yuna's dumb meeting with the stupid razor people, and whether the Bears would be able to add any depth on defense before the trade deadline, and how there weren't any good Mexican restaurants in Boston and that unfortunately the same was also true in Ottawa. When she had left, she'd kissed him on the cheek, told him to watch out for Detroit when he played them later that night and that she was looking forward to seeing him at Christmas.
"What I was also thinking," Ilya said, "Is that I had so many women over to that apartment, so many crazy parties, and it was good and fun--"
"Great, I love where this is going."
"--But none of it made me as happy as having lunch with your mother and knowing that she liked me."
"I get that you're trying to say something that's actually kind of sweet, but I cannot emphasize enough how much it sounds like you were trying to hook up with my fucking mom." Shane made his point with two more sharp elbow jabs. "Also, my mom doesn't just like you, my mom loves you. You know that."
"Sure, okay, now." He waved his hand dismissively, even though it made a warm feeling bloom in his chest to be so confident in Yuna's affection. "But back then? I was very happy to settle for just like. You know how it is with Hollanders. You have to hook up with them for a while before the feelings start to grow."
Shane shot him a withering glare. "I am going to kill you if you do not shut the fuck up," he said, and then, "Wait, weren't we just talking about my trainwreck threesome? How did we go from that to talking about you having sex with my mother? Holy shit, I hate this conversation."
Ilya kind of loved this conversation, but he could think of better things to be doing with their time if Shane was planning to insist that they go to sleep sometime in the next hour, which he was definitely going to do. "Sorry, sorry," he said. "I will make you forget about sex with your mother." He dipped his fingers down under the waistband of Shane's sweatpants and gave him a suggestive look.
"You are such an asshole. That is like … absolutely the worst come-on I've ever heard in my entire life. And I once watched J.J. try to pick up a girl by talking about his shoe size."
"I retired all my good pick-up lines when we got married," Ilya told him. "No need now that I have a sure thing." Then he grinned, because Shane was already tilting his head up to kiss him. "And it is working, yes?"
"Eat shit, Rozanov," Shane said, and pressed their mouths together.
They traded increasingly heated kisses for a few minutes before Shane got up on his knees and Ilya slid down on the bed, knowing the right angle to be able to take Shane in his mouth and not wake up with a fucked-up neck tomorrow. He nosed at Shane's still mostly soft dick through his sweatpants, just saying hello. Then he shoved down the sweatpants and his underwear while Shane pulled off his hoodie and the threadbare t-shirt underneath. It was an easy, practiced rhythm, designed to get in a little something before they fell asleep.
And because Ilya was sentimental and soft now, it made him happy that they could have sex like this. Sometimes they were both too tired to fuck after games, but trading blowjobs was also good. Doing anything with Shane was always good.
He put his hands on Shane's hips and started licking stripes up and down his cock from shaft to tip, occasionally moving down to mouth at his balls. He watched him quickly get hard and then he let a trail of Shane's pre-come smear over his lips and across his cheek.
"C'mon," Shane hissed, jutting his hips forward.. "Ilya, please."
"Please what?"
"Please put my fucking dick in your mouth."
"Hmm, okay. Since you ask so nicely, yes." Ilya laid a kiss on the soft juncture where Shane's leg met his torso, and then swallowed him deep and let his jaw go slack. He tried to zone out on the heady feeling of Shane filling up his mouth and stop being such a soft bitch, but he wasn't very good at hiding from himself, not anymore.
This was the thing: back in the beginning, every time they'd fucked had potentially been the last time, so there'd been extra incentive to make it count. And that had led to a lot of really fucking hot sex, so no complaints there. And then there'd been years when they were in love and every time they fucked was like a promise to keep them going during the stretches in between, and those times had also been really hot.
So many times, they'd pushed through to fuck when they were both exhausted, and when one of them was hurt, and a bunch of different times when they probably should have finished having an argument instead of trying to pound a hole through the mattress. One time that final year in Boston, they'd had sex when Ilya had a 38C fever because it had been the last night before they wouldn't see each other for two and a half months.
So maybe it was kind of great to have lazy married people sex sometimes. If they wanted to go all out, put Shane's yoga sessions to good use and up the ante on how many times Ilya could make him come in a single night, they could do that when they got home tomorrow. They wouldn't have to wait for three weeks or two months from now, not anymore.
"Hang on," Shane said, "Let me--" Then he put one hand on the headboard for leverage and Ilya almost felt bad for people whose definition of lazy married sex didn't include some light face fucking.
"God, you look so good like that," Shane said. "You always look so good. I love you so fucking much."
Shane was the one who looked good, though. Powerful and confident, his calves squeezing Ilya's shoulders. He was flushed pink all over and the chain with his wedding ring swung back and forth against his chest. He kept one hand braced on this headboard and used the other one to grip the back of Ilya's head, tugging on his hair.
"Fuck, I can't," Shane said, thrusting forward to bury his cock even further down Ilya's throat. "Ilya, fuck, I'm gonna--" And then Shane was coming, collapsing forward and flooding every part of Ilya with his weight and smell and heat.
Ilya moved his hands down to rub the back of Shane's thighs while he twitched through the aftershocks. Then he let Shane's dick slip out of his mouth and propped himself up on his elbows so he could watch Shane shimmy his way down the bed to return the favor. Because Shane was also sentimental and soft, he paused long enough to kiss Ilya's own wedding ring, where it was also kept safe on his chain during the season.
Watching Shane fuck his mouth had already gotten Ilya pretty worked up, so it wasn't long before he was shooting his own load down Shane's throat. Afterward, he flopped down on his back and Shane scooted up so they were lying side-by-side on the bed. As usual, Shane's brain was back online a disturbingly short amount of time after they'd both come their brains out.
"So, wait," Shane said. "Before we were talking about threesomes and my mom and you distracted me, we were talking about Crozier. Do you think we should talk to him?"
"Sure." Ilya didn't really care about Crozier at this point. If the kid had been his own teammate, then it would be another story. But some random rookie? Whatever. Still, he wasn't surprised that Shane felt differently.
"We won't play them again for a while, though. I don't think I want to wait that long," Shane said, considering. "Oh, but that guy Korhonen, he's still in Seattle. I played with him for a couple years, I could ask him for Crozier's number. And then I could text him and be like, I don't know, I was impressed with your game when we played you last week."
Ilya smirked. "But you were not impressed with his game. Said he was a bust, yes? That he had weak ankles and was all tools and no toolbox."
"Well, yeah, but I don't have to tell him that."
"Don't be too nice, or he will think you want threesome."
Shane was quiet for a moment, and then he said, "Look, just so you know, I don't think I'm ever going to want us to have a threesome."
Ilya wasn't sure why that was news. "Of course not," he said, reaching over to tangle their hands together on the bed. "If I had to watch someone else touch you, I would probably kill them. Not very sexy."
Shane's face scrunched up like he couldn't decide if he was confused, annoyed or pleased. "Then why do you keep teasing me about it?" he said. "You literally asked me last week if I wanted to have a threesome with that photographer who kept looking at your dick print."
He leaned over so he could smack a kiss on Shane's cheek. "Sweetheart, I love to tease," he said. "You know this. But if you want, I will stop teasing. Just about this, though. If you tell me to stop entirely I will probably die and then you will be a widow. Is that what you want?"
"Widower," Shane said. "But no, I guess we wouldn't want that."
"You would be a very beautiful widow. Would cry perfect tears standing over my coffin."
Shane reached over with his free hand to punch him in the shoulder. "Do not joke about your death, asshole, I will go sleep in Wyatt and Bood's room."
Ilya raised his eyebrows with exaggerated astonishment. "Hollander, c'mon. I thought we just agreed we would not tease about threesomes anymore?"
Shane ignored him, and because he could never let anything go, he said, "I do want to talk to Crozier somehow. If he's gay, I want things to be … I don't know, I want them to be better for him."
"Hey, did I not say he could be bisexual? What is this, is this what Harris is always talking about? This is 'bisexual erasure.'"
"Sure, okay. But if he's … like us, then--"
Ilya shook his head, because even if the kid liked to suck dick, putting him in the same category as the two best players in the league was like Amber Pike in her Barbie Corvette racing against two Formula 1 drivers. "He is not really like us," he said. "Is probably going to wash out of the league in, like, three years."
Shane snorted. "I mean, you're not wrong. If I want to talk to him, I should probably do it before he gets sent down for the rest of the season."
Ilya rolled on his side so he could wrap an arm around Shane's middle and rest his head on his shoulder. He wanted to touch as much warm skin as possible for the ten minutes before Shane made them get up to brush their teeth. "Okay, talk to Crozier," he said. "Ask him to show you prom pictures or something."
They'd spent so many years afraid to really talk about anything. It was nice that they could talk about everything now; maybe-gay rookies with weak ankles and bad threesomes and nervous lunches with Shane's mother. Soon, Shane would probably start talking again, about how Edmonton was getting overcoached or that he'd heard Seattle had a shitty scouting department, and that would be boring but also nice.
But instead of that, Shane said, "I wish we could have gone to prom together."
"Absolutely not," said Ilya, because it was one thing to be a soft bitch, but he couldn't let Shane become delusional. Not when he'd already had so many head injuries. "Whatever you are imagining right now, you would hate it so much that you would want to die." He held up a finger to start ticking off reasons. "Being gay in public. Fancy clothes and loud music. Big crowd. Dancing! Tell me I'm not describing your personal hell."
"I don't know, that kind of sounds like our wedding, and that was the best day of my life."
Ilya couldn't dispute that, because it was very sweet and because every part of their wedding was a perfect memory, including the big crowd. Halfway through the night, the two of them had been talking to Caitlin and Dykstra and Caitlin had asked why there weren't any chairs. Shane, looking happy and helpless, had said, "I thought like ten people were going to show up! Everyone would have fit around the dining table."
"How about this?" Ilya told him. "I will take you as my date to the NHL Awards, after you don't get nominated for anything because you have become very bad at hockey and the only way you can get in is as a plus-one."
"In your fucking dreams. You can be my plus-one, how about that?"
"Or maybe they will make a new award. Best husbands trophy. Crowell can present it. We will win every year."
Shane laughed, and Ilya could feel the rumble of it coming from his chest under his cheek. "That sounds like a plan," Shane said. "Looking forward to it."
Ilya was looking forward to everything. Especially the five minutes between now and when Shane made them get up to brush their teeth.