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The road into La Minerve gave out a kilometer from the cabin, and Ilya said nothing for the first time all day.
Shane noticed. He noticed everything when he was driving in snow, every fishtail and soft spot. He also noticed the man beside him, who had talked the whole way from Montreal and then gone quiet around the turn for the lake. Ilya was looking out at the white trees now with a face Shane could not read.
"You okay," Shane said.
"I am thinking."
"That's never good."
"Funny." Ilya did not look over. The wipers shoved the snow off the glass and more came down to take its place. "It is very far. Your cabin. There is nothing out here."
"That's the point."
"I know it is the point. I am only saying." Ilya finally turned. "If something happens. There is no one."
"Nothing's going to happen."
"You do not know this."
Shane let it go, because the truck was climbing the last rise and he needed both hands and most of his attention, and then they were over the top and there it was. Low and brown under a foot of new snow. Dark windows. The woodpile a white lump against the north wall. His grandfather built the first two rooms in 1961. His father added the rest. Shane had come here his whole life, and brought exactly no one who was not a Hollander until the man in the passenger seat.
He killed the engine. The quiet came down hard.
"This is it," Shane said.
Ilya looked at it a long moment. Whatever was happening behind his face did not resolve. "It is small," he said.
"It's a cabin."
"I am not complaining. I am observing." He opened his door and the cold came in like a hand. "It is small, and it is far, and there is no one, and I have decided I like it. Get the bags."
They had a name for it now. Six months, officially.
Shane kept the number in his head like he kept his shot total and his plus-minus, because it was new enough to still be a number and not just a fact of his life. Six months since the summer at the cottage. Six months since Dad caught them.
It was stupid, how it happened. Eleven years of careful, of hotel rooms and back doors and burner phones and fake names in each other's contacts. Eleven years, and then a phone charger. Shane had told his parents he was on a silent retreat so they would not come by. Dad came by anyway, for a spare charger, let himself in, and walked out back to find Shane and Ilya kissing on the dock in the afternoon sun. No warning. No chance to explain it first, which was the one thing Shane had always sworn he would do. Explain it first.
Dad did not say anything. That was the worst part. He went still in the doorway, then turned and left, drove off before Shane could get his shoes on. Shane stood on the dock with his heart coming apart, certain it was ruined, certain his nightmare had finally come true. It was Ilya who held it together. Ilya who said they would go and talk to them, today, now. Ilya who held Shane's hand the whole drive to his parents' house and did not let go once.
That was the day the word happened. Shane walked in and ripped the bandage off, said he was in love, said he was sorry it came out like this. Ilya stood beside him and called them lovers, which made his mom laugh even with her hand still over her mouth. Then the vodka came out and the four of them sat at the table, and it got long, and it got heavy. His parents learning it went back to before the rookie season. His mom going quiet and sad when she understood the plan was to hide until they retired. The word retire sitting in the kitchen like a stone. And somewhere in all of it the pressure stacked up in Shane's chest. Scott Hunter's name came up, brave Scott who did it the right way, out loud, in front of the world. Shane felt the floor tilt. He put his head down on the table and could not get a breath.
It was Ilya who brought him back. Ilya's hand flat and warm between his shoulder blades, Ilya's voice low and even, telling him his family was here and his boyfriend was here and he was good. Boyfriend. The first time the word was ever said about them out loud. Ilya said it into the worst minute of Shane's life like it was the simplest fact in the world. A hand on his back, a kiss on the side of his head, and the floor came level again. Shane still heard it sometimes when he could not sleep. The steadiness of it. One word, said low into the worst minute of his life, and it reached him when nothing else could. Boyfriend. Mine.
Most days Ilya did not say the big words at all. He had a different one. He called Shane boring. Boring with your water and your eight hours and your spreadsheet and your bedtime. Boring, you Lysol the hotel remote. Boring, you will not split the dessert. He had said it for eleven years, since they were nineteen. Somewhere in the first few Shane cracked the code. Ilya only ever said it soft, only ever with his eyes doing something his mouth would not, only ever when Shane had done some small careful ordinary thing that a person who did not love him would never have noticed at all. Boring meant I love you. It always had. Ilya could say boring in a crowded room, on a podcast, across a faceoff. No one heard it but Shane. And Shane heard it every time, clear as a bell. It was the safest I love you in the world and it was theirs.
It made everything heavier and lighter at once. Heavier because now there was something to lose on purpose. Lighter because Ilya had spent Christmas in Ottawa with the Hollanders, four days, his first ever. He had sat at Shane's mom's table and let Dad pour him too much wine and looked, by every measure Shane could find, happy. Dad never once held the dock against him. He introduced Ilya to the neighbors as Shane's friend, because that was still the rule outside the family. But inside the house Mom called him Shane's boyfriend, easy, passing the potatoes. Ilya had gone still and careful for a second, like he was not sure he was allowed to keep the word. Then he kept it.
That was the part Shane kept turning over. Ilya happy in a family. Ilya, whose mother died when he was twelve, whose father was a closed door, who had built a whole loud public self out of having no one to go home to. Shane watched him across the Christmas table laughing at one of his dad's terrible jokes and felt something in his chest he had no word for, and said nothing, because he never could.
They unloaded in the storm. Two bags, a cooler, the case of beer Ilya insisted on, the groceries Shane bought in town because he did not trust the one store in La Minerve to have a vegetable. The snow was past his boots. Ilya carried the heavy cooler like it weighed nothing and dropped it on the porch. He stood there a second looking back at the road, already filling in their tracks.
"There is really no one," he said again, quietly, and Shane could not tell if it scared him or not.
"There's us."
"Yes." Ilya picked the cooler back up. "There is us."
The first fight was about the woodstove, which meant it was not about the woodstove.
Shane came up from the crawlspace where he had coaxed the old furnace to catch. He found Ilya crouched at the stove, building a fire like a man who has never once been cold without a building to fix it. Logs stacked like a fort, no kindling, the flue half shut.
"That won't draw," Shane said.
"It is drawing."
"It's smoking. You've got the flue half shut."
"It is fine."
"It's filling the room." Shane crossed and reached past him to open the damper and Ilya did not move, did not give him the space, so Shane had to lean across his whole crouched body to reach it, and Ilya said, low and sharp, "I can build a fire, Hollander."
"Then build one that doesn't smoke."
"I am from Russia."
"That's not a thing. Being from Russia isn't a fire skill." Shane heard his own voice climbing and could not stop it. He got the damper open. The smoke thinned. "You stack it like a campfire. It's a stove. It needs air underneath."
Ilya stood up. He was a head taller and he used it, the same as he did on the ice, getting into Shane's space, making Shane feel the size of him. "You do this," he said. "All week you will do this. Fix the fire I make. Fix the eggs I cook. Re-stack the wood I stack. I have seen you do it before. You cannot let one thing be wrong."
"It was smoking."
"It is always something." Ilya's jaw was tight. "In your family's house, your family's cabin, your family's wood, with the Hollander way to do every small thing, and me, doing it wrong."
And there it was. Shane stood very still and understood, a beat too late, the same as always, that they were not talking about the fire.
"Hey," Shane said.
"It is fine."
"It's not the fire."
"It is the fire." Ilya turned away. "Leave it. You win. The flue is open. You are correct, as always."
Shane stood in the smoke-smelling room with his heart going and did the math. Six months. Four days at his mom's table. A man who had never had a family, doing his first family Christmas, then driving straight into a Hollander house, on Hollander land. Where Shane fixed his fires and corrected his eggs and re-stacked his wood. What that might feel like, to someone keeping score of every place he did not quite belong.
He was bad at words. He was good at this. He crossed the room and got his hand in the back of Ilya's shirt and turned him, and Ilya let himself be turned, which was the whole answer.
"You built a good fire," Shane said.
"It smoked."
"It smoked a little." Shane got both hands in his shirt now. "You're allowed to build it wrong. It's your cabin too. This week. It's yours too."
Something moved through Ilya's face. He looked down at Shane, and the public man was gone, the king of the ice was gone. What was left was a big tired person who had spent thirty years braced for the moment the warm thing got taken back.
"You re-stack my wood," Ilya said.
"I'll stop."
"You will not stop. You cannot help it."
"I'll try." Shane pulled him down by the shirt. "I'll try really hard, okay. Now shut up."
Ilya shut up. The fire drew. It climbed the badly stacked logs and found enough air anyway, and burned. The two of them stood in front of it and kissed until the room got warm, and neither re-stacked anything.
The making up was better than the fight. The making up was always better.
Ilya walked him backward toward the old plaid couch without breaking the kiss, both hands under Shane's sweater now, big cold hands on his bare back. Shane hissed and Ilya laughed into his mouth and did not warm them first. He never warmed them first. It was a whole personality.
"Your hands are freezing."
"You will warm them."
"With my body?"
"With your body. Yes. It is your job." Ilya got him down onto the couch and followed him, all that weight settling over Shane, pinning him into the cushions that smelled of forty years of cottage, and Shane stopped caring about his cold hands or anything else. Six months in and it still did this. Still emptied his head completely. The constant Hollander noise of it, the lists and the scores and the things he should have said, gone the second Ilya put his mouth on his throat.
"Up here," Ilya said, getting Shane's sweater off over his head, tossing it somewhere. "The fire is warm. Stay where it is warm."
"Bedroom's warmer."
"The bedroom is far." Ilya's mouth was moving down his chest. "The bedroom is a whole room away. I cannot wait for the room."
Shane laughed, and then Ilya's hand was at the front of his jeans and the laugh turned into something else. The cabin was small and far and held no one but the two of them. That, it turned out, was the entire point. No hotel walls. No teammate in the next room. No six a.m. flight. Shane could be as loud as the empty woods allowed, and the woods allowed everything. Ilya had spent eleven years learning every quiet way to take Shane apart in rooms where they could not make a sound. He set about it now with no rules at all.
After, Shane lay sprawled and wrecked on the couch, his jeans somewhere on the floor, the fire ticking, Ilya's head heavy on his chest. He stared at the antlers his grandfather mounted in 1972 and felt his heartbeat come back down to something human.
"We have to do the bedroom eventually," Shane said. "I'm not sleeping on this couch all week."
"Mm."
"Ilya."
"I am resting. I have done a great deal of work." Ilya did not move. "You are welcome."
The second fight was about the eggs.
Shane woke to the smell of burning and the sound of Ilya having words with the cast iron pan. He came out to find him at the propane stove in boxers and one of Shane's flannel shirts that would not button across his chest, scowling at eggs gone brown on one side and raw on the other.
"What is that," Shane said.
"Breakfast. Sit."
Shane made the mistake of looking in the pan.
"Do not," Ilya said.
"I didn't say anything."
"You have a face. You came in and you saw and you made the face." Ilya pointed the spatula. "I am making you breakfast. In my cabin. With my eggs. You will sit and you will eat and you will not fix it."
"I'm not going to fix your eggs."
"You fixed my fire."
"That was a safety thing."
"It is always a safety thing." Ilya slid the disaster onto a plate. "Or a Hollander thing. Or a, the right way thing. I cooked for you and you stood there and made the face that says, Ilya, you have done it wrong again."
Shane opened his mouth to argue and shut it. The man was not entirely wrong. He had spent six months learning that loving someone who grew up with no one meant every correction landed somewhere a correction should not land. Shane corrected because he wanted things right. Ilya heard, every time, you are not getting it right, like he must have heard his whole life from everyone who was supposed to stay and did not.
So Shane sat down. He picked up a fork. He ate the eggs, which were genuinely terrible, raw in the middle and scorched at the edge, and he ate all of them, and then he said, "These are good."
"They are not good."
"They're good."
"You are lying. I can see you lying. Your whole face is lying." But Ilya sat down across from him with his own plate, and under the table his bare foot hooked around Shane's ankle and stayed, and his mouth was doing something it did not do in public, something that started small and could not quite be stopped, and Shane understood that the lie was the right answer. Not the truth. The lie. The lie that said I will eat anything you hand me. I am not going anywhere. You did not do it wrong.
"They're a little raw," Shane allowed.
"Now you are honest." Ilya looked pleased, somehow, at being corrected, because Shane had eaten them first. "Tomorrow I make them better."
"You're cooking again tomorrow?"
"I am cooking all week. You will suffer." Ilya pointed the fork at him. "It is good for you. It builds the character."
The storm came back in the afternoon, harder than the first night, and buried the truck the rest of the way.
They watched it from inside, which was the only place to watch it from. The snow stopped falling straight and started flying, sideways, long hissing sheets of it against the black windows, and the porch light caught it in a moving cone, and past the cone there was nothing. No woodpile. No truck. No lake. Just white moving through yellow and then dark. Shane stood at the sink with a glass of water and felt the old cabin take the wind on its north corner and hold.
"We are not getting out tomorrow," Ilya said. He sounded pleased about it.
"Probably not."
"Or the next day."
"Depends on Jacques."
"There is no Jacques." Ilya had decided this on day one and would not be moved. "You invented Jacques so I would not panic. There is no plow. There is no road. There is only us, and the bad eggs, and the lake that screams."
Shane let him have it. The truth was that Jacques was real, a sixty-year-old with a one-ton and a temper who plowed the private roads when he felt like it. But the version where there was no Jacques and no road and no way out was the better version. Shane was learning, slowly, six months in, that sometimes the better version was the one you let stand.
Ilya found a deck of cards in the drawer under the antlers, soft and furred at the corners from forty years of cottage hands, and taught Shane a Russian game with rules that changed whenever Ilya started losing.
"That is not a card you can play," Shane said.
"It is. It is the, the wolf card. It beats anything."
"There's no wolf card. It's the same deck I have. There's no wolves in it."
"In the Russian rules there is a wolf. You do not have the Russian rules. You have the boring Canadian rules where everything is fair." Ilya laid down the impossible card and raked the pile toward himself, beaming. "Here we play the true rules. My grandmother's rules."
"Your grandmother cheated."
"My grandmother was a great woman. She survived many things. Cheating at cards is nothing. It is a love language." Ilya dealt again, badly, cards going everywhere. "You should be honored I cheat you. It means I like you."
"That's insane."
"It is Russian." He said it like the two were the same. "You want me to play fair, you are saying you want me to be a stranger. A stranger I play fair. You I cheat. This is intimacy."
Shane threw a card at his head, and it stuck for a second in Ilya's hair. Ilya left it there, dealing on with the seven of clubs over his ear like an idiot, and Shane laughed so hard he had to put his own cards down.
It was a small thing and it landed strange in Shane's chest anyway, like everything kept doing all week. Six months in. He kept catching the size of it sideways. Ilya at his sink, Ilya in his flannel, Ilya inventing wolves at his grandmother's card table in his grandfather's cabin with snow burying the only road out, and not once looking at the door. A man who measured every room for the exit, here, not measuring. It did something to Shane he did not have words for and could not have said out loud if he did.
"You are thinking loud again," Ilya said, not looking up.
"I'm not."
"You think so loud I cannot count my cards."
"You're cheating at the count too."
"Yes. But I would like to cheat in quiet." Ilya finally looked up, the card still over his ear, and his face was doing the open thing, the unguarded thing, the one that surfaced more this week than Shane had seen in all the years before it. "Tell me the loud thought. You are bad at saying. Say it badly. I will not laugh."
Shane turned the soft old card over in his fingers. He was bad at this. He had always been bad at this. But the cabin was small and the snow was loud and there was no door anyone was watching, so he made himself.
"I just like you here," Shane said. "In the cabin. At the table. With the dumb card on your head. That's the thought. That's the whole loud thought."
Ilya took the seven of clubs off his ear and looked at it. For a second he did not say anything, and the wind leaned on the north corner, and the fire ticked.
"That is a good loud thought," Ilya said finally, rough. "Keep that one. Think it as loud as you want."
He dealt again. He cheated again. Shane let him.
The lake spoke for the first time that afternoon, and it scared the hell out of Ilya.
They were out on the porch with coffee, looking at the white sheet of it running off into a white sky with no horizon between them. The ice made a long low groan that rolled out across the bay and came back faint off the far shore. Ilya went rigid. His coffee stopped halfway to his mouth.
"What was that."
"The lake."
"The lake made a sound."
"The ice shifts." Shane could not help the grin. "It settles. It's getting thicker. It only does it when it's getting stronger."
"It sounds like the house is breaking."
"It's a lake, not the house."
"It sounds like a, a death." Ilya was genuinely unsettled, this enormous man who feared nothing on the ice, spooked by a frozen lake in the woods. "In Moscow the ice does not speak."
"This ice talks. My dad told me when I was little it just means the lake's getting stronger. Used to scare me too." Shane leaned on the rail next to him. "Now I like it."
The lake groaned again, longer, and Ilya actually stepped closer to Shane, shoulder to shoulder, and pretended he had not, and Shane let him pretend.
"It is a strange place, your family's lake," Ilya said.
"It's a good place."
"I did not say it is not good." Ilya drank his coffee. The light was going gold across the snow, the brief astonishing ten minutes near four when the sun found a gap and lit the whole frozen bay on fire before it dropped. They watched it without talking. "I had not been," Ilya said finally, "to a place like this. A place a family keeps. For a long time. The same place. The grandfather builds it, the father builds more, the boy swims off the dock." He was quiet. "We did not keep places."
Shane did not say anything. He had learned that the not-saying was sometimes the saying, that if he waited, Ilya would go where he was going.
"At Christmas," Ilya said, to the lake, not to Shane. "Your mother. She had the, the same ornaments. From when you were small. She told me the story of each one. The ugly one you made. The one your grandmother brought from somewhere." He turned the coffee cup in his hands. "Forty years of the same ornaments. I did not know people kept things so long."
"Yeah," Shane said. His throat was tight. "She does that."
"It was very strange." Ilya's voice was even. "To sit in it. The keeping. The same ornaments, the same table, the same lake. I kept thinking, this is a thing people have. All this time, people have had this." He stopped. The lake groaned. "And I did not."
Shane stood there with his heart breaking quietly on the porch in the gold light. He did the only thing he knew how to do, which was never the right words. He did the truer thing instead. He put his coffee down on the rail. He got his hand around the back of Ilya's neck. He pulled him down until their foreheads touched, like they did on the ice after a goal, when no one could tell it apart from rivalry. Except here there was no one, and it was not rivalry, and it never had been.
"You have it now," Shane said. "Okay? The ornaments. The lake. All of it. You're in the story now. My mom told you the ornament stories because you're in the family stories now. That's what that was."
Ilya did not say anything. His hand came up and gripped Shane's wrist, hard, and held on.
"You're in it," Shane said again, because he could feel that the first time had not landed, that a man braced for thirty years did not unbrace in one go. "This isn't a thing I'm going to take back. I know I don't say it good. I know I fix your fires and your eggs and I'm bad at the words. But you're in it. You're not borrowing it. It's yours."
The sun went down. The gold went off the lake all at once, fast, and left the blue, and the cold came up sharper without it, and Ilya breathed out long and shaking against Shane's mouth.
"You are bad at the words," Ilya said.
"I know."
"That was not bad."
"No?"
"It was almost good." Ilya's voice cracked on it and he covered the crack with a kiss, hard and a little desperate, his cold coffee hands coming up to hold Shane's face, and Shane kissed him back on the freezing porch until the blue went to dark and the porch light clicked on over them, two of the most watched men in the country, watched by no one, finally, by the lake that only spoke to say it was getting stronger.
In the morning Ilya wanted to fish.
Shane was still in bed when he said it, both of them warm under the quilts with the window a square of white, and he thought he had misheard.
"You want to what."
"Fish. The lake. It is frozen. We cut a hole, we fish." Ilya was already up, pulling on socks. "You have the equipment. The little house I saw, by the shed. The auger."
"The ice shack. Yeah. It's my dad's." Shane sat up. "You fish?"
"I fish." Ilya did not elaborate. He found his sweater. "Get up. The morning is the time. The fish are hungry in the morning."
Shane got up. He did not know what he expected. They dragged the auger and the bucket and the short rods out across the bay through snow up to his knees, the cold so clean it hurt his teeth. Ilya walked ahead of him, reading the ice like Shane did not know he could read it. He stopped at a spot that looked like every other spot and crouched and put his bare hand flat on the snow and was still for a moment, and then he said, "Here," and he was not asking.
"How do you know here."
"The shape of the shore. The wind. The snow is thinner. There is a current under, I think. The fish hold where the current is." Ilya took the auger. "Stand back. Always behind the man with the auger, never beside. If it kicks it takes the hand off."
It came out of him fast and clean, an order with a reason attached, and the reason was a missing hand. Shane stepped back. He had heard Ilya talk a thousand ways, but not this way, not in this voice with another man's grammar in it.
He cut the hole in under two minutes, fast and even, no wasted motion, his whole big body settled into it like he had done it a thousand times. Shane stood in the snow holding the bucket and watched a side of the man he had slept next to since they were nineteen and never once seen. Ilya cleared the slush from the hole with a practiced scoop of his glove. He stripped off one glove with his teeth to bait the small hook, bare fingers working the line in cold that should have stopped them. Shane watched him not feel it. Watched the hand do the fine work the cold should have ruined, and understood that somewhere a person had made him do this until the not-feeling became the skill. He set the rod, and dropped the line, and went completely still.
The stillness was what Shane could not stop looking at. Ilya was never still. Ilya filled rooms, took space, performed. Here on the ice he had gone quiet and patient and economical, and it was not peace. Shane saw that now. It was the opposite of peace. It was a body holding itself the only way it knew how, trained into it. Hours on the ice waiting for a line to move, a boy taught that stillness was survival and noise was punishment. The man it made was very good, and very far away.
"Okay," Shane said. "Where'd you learn this? You're from Moscow. You did not learn this in Moscow."
Ilya did not look up from the hole. For a while Shane thought he would not answer, and then he did, flat, to the ice.
"Siberia. I was fifteen." He adjusted the line a fraction. "My father signed me to a program. Eight weeks. Junior army. Survival training, in the winter, in the taiga." A small pull on the rod, released. "You learn to fish or you are hungry. It is not a hobby there. You learn fast."
Shane stood very still in the cold.
"Your dad sent you to army survival camp," Shane said. "At fifteen."
"To make a man of me." Ilya's voice did not change. He said it flat, a thing he had said to himself many times until it stopped having a sound. "He thought I was soft. The preening, the, the looking in mirrors, the wanting nice things. He thought eight weeks in the snow would fix it." The rod twitched. He let it. "There was a man there. Volkov. He was in charge of us. He had a way of teaching the fishing." Ilya's jaw moved. "If you came back to the camp with nothing, you did not eat. He said the fish do not care that you are tired. The cold does not care. Only the work cares. So you learn the work."
"You were fifteen."
"We were all fifteen. Some younger." Ilya pulled the line, let it settle. His voice stayed level and that was the worst of it, the levelness, the thing laid down so long ago it had stopped being able to shake. "The first week I caught nothing. I did not eat much that week. The second week I caught a fish." Something pulled at his mouth that did not reach being a smile, and went somewhere else entirely. "I remember it more than goals. The first fish. I was so hungry. Volkov said, now you are not useless. It was the nicest thing he said in eight weeks. Now you are not useless." He shrugged, slow, enormous under the layers. "So, I am good at this. I am good at it like a dog is good at the trick you beat into it."
Shane's chest hurt.
"That's not a skill," Shane said. "What you're describing. That's not him teaching you to fish. That's a grown man starving a kid."
"It is both." Ilya finally looked up, and his face was doing the flat true thing, the one harder to look at than any of his sadnesses. "That is what I cannot make people understand. It is both. I can fish through a meter of ice and that is real, it is mine, it keeps. And also a man made me afraid enough to learn it. Both things are in the same hands." He looked down at his own bare hand on the rod, the one the cold could not reach anymore. "My father gave me this. I hate that I use it. I love that I can. It is the only thing of his I have and it is made of being hungry and afraid at fifteen. So..." He said the word again, the one he used to close a door. "It is a strange morning. To use it here. On your family's lake. Where no one is going to not feed me if I catch nothing."
Shane did the math, a beat behind as always, and it broke his heart twice. Fifteen and shipped to the snow by a man who found him soft, taught to fish by a man who used hunger as the lesson. And six days ago, thirty and across a table from Shane's dad, who poured him wine and told him terrible jokes and made no project of him at all and would have fed him whether he caught anything in his whole life or not. Two ways to make a man. Ilya had survived the first and did not have words for the second, and was standing on the second one's lake using the first one's gift, and feeling all of it, and fishing.
"Come here," Shane said.
"I am fishing."
"I know. Come here anyway. You can fish in a second."
Ilya looked at him. Then he set the rod carefully against the bucket and stood, and let Shane pull him in by the front of his coat. Shane did not say any of the things. There were no right ones, and he was bad at them anyway. He just held on, on the ice, in the cold, the two of them a single dark shape on a white lake under a white sky, and Ilya's arms came around him and held back, hard.
"Your father was wrong," Shane said into his collar. "You weren't soft. You were a kid who liked nice things. That's not soft. That's just a kid."
Ilya breathed out, long.
"And for the record," Shane said, "you didn't need making into anything. You were already the whole thing. He just couldn't see it."
Ilya did not answer. Shane felt him go very still in his arms, the bad still, the trained still, and then felt it cost him to come back out of it. A man told a kind thing at the wrong angle to the bracing, so it could not land flat, kept catching on the brace.
"You cannot just say that," Ilya said into Shane's hair, low. "On the ice. While I am holding a rod. You cannot just say a thing like that and expect me to... not do anything with it."
"I'm not asking you to do anything with it."
"Then why do you say it."
"Because it's true and nobody told you." Shane kept his arms where they were. "You don't have to do anything. You can just have it. I'll say it again some other time when you're not holding a rod, and you still won't have to do anything with it. That's how it works now."
Ilya breathed against him, one long pull, and then another. Shane could feel him working at it, the slow business of letting a good thing through a body built to keep good things out. It took a while. Shane let it take a while. The cold sat on them and the lake was quiet under their boots and neither of them said anything, and that was the saying.
When Ilya finally pulled back, his eyes were wet and he did not pretend they were not, which was its own thing, which was new.
"Okay," Ilya said. Rough. "Okay."
"Yeah?"
"I will try to have it." He wiped his face with the back of his glove, unbothered, like wiping off snow. "It is hard. To have a thing instead of earn it. But I will try. You are patient. You said. The long game."
"I'm patient."
"And you cheat. Like my grandmother."
"I don't cheat."
"You will learn." Ilya almost got the rod back to his hands, and then the line moved.
It moved small at first, a twitch he caught before Shane saw anything, and his whole body changed. The grief slid off him and the focus came up. He crouched to the hole and set his feet and waited. He did not rush it. He let the fish take the bait fully, two seconds, three, his bare hand steady on the line, and only then did he pull, smooth, no jerk, and the rod bent.
"There," Ilya said, quiet. "There it is."
The fish came up thrashing silver through the black hole into the white morning, a fat lake trout. Ilya brought it onto the ice and got a hand around it and laughed, the real laugh, the one no camera had caught. The wet was still on his face and the laugh sat on top of it at the same time, both at once. Both things in the same hands, like he said.
"You see," Ilya said, holding it up in the cold like a Cup. "I told you. The morning is the time."
"You got one."
"I got one. On your family's lake." He looked at the fish, and something moved through his face, complicated, the camp and the kitchen and the cold all in it. And then he looked at Shane, and it cleared, not because the complicated part left but because he let the other part sit next to it. "I decide it is a good thing. Today. The fish, the lake, the thing my father gave me, all of it. I decide it is good, because you are here and no one is keeping the food from me." He said it like signing his name to something. "I have decided."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah." He tried the word in Shane's accent and butchered it on purpose. "We keep it. We fry it badly. I will cook it and you will say it is delicious and you will be lying and I will let you."
They caught three more. Ilya cleaned them on the ice with a small sure knife, fast, the boy from the taiga in his hands and the man from the Christmas table in his face. This time the two did not seem to be fighting each other. Shane carried the bucket back across the bay. The lake groaned its low getting-stronger groan under their boots, and Ilya did not flinch at it once.
The third fight was not really a fight. It was the closest they came to the real one and they both stepped back from it at the edge.
It was the last night. Five days at the cabin now, snowed deeper every one of them, the truck a dune in the drive, the road unplowed because Jacques got to it when Jacques got to it. Tomorrow they had to find a way out, because the season did not wait. Shane to Montreal. Ilya to Ottawa. Back to the long season of hotel rooms and back doors and not looking at each other on the ice.
Shane was packing the cooler. Ilya was watching him do it and not helping, and finally said, "I do not want to go back."
"I know."
"I mean it, Shane. I do not want to go."
"I don't either." Shane kept packing. It was easier to do this with his hands busy. "But we knew it was a week."
"A week." Ilya's voice had an edge now. "One week. And then ten more months of the phone. Of the, the hotel in the city neither of us lives. Of your teammates who think you are alone. Of my whole team who would, who would not..." He stopped himself. "I had this. Five days. And I have to give it back."
Shane stood up from the cooler. "You're not giving it back. We talked about this. We do the season and then summer's ours, the whole summer, the cottage, all of it..."
"And the season is eight months."
"I know how long the season is."
"You go home to your mother's table." Ilya's jaw was tight, the Christmas thing right under the surface again, six days of it never fully gone. "And I go home to nothing. To the apartment. To a city where I have no one. And I smile for the cameras and I say nothing and I wait for the phone to ring and it is you, in your bed, in your city, with your family one hour away."
It was not fair and it was completely true, and Shane felt the old asymmetry of it open up under them like the lake under the ice. He had the family. He had the citizenship. He had the friends who knew, the team that had come around, the city, the parents an hour away. Ilya had the apartment and the bad team and the phone, and the only thing on his side of the scale was Shane, and Shane lived a closed border and a different team away.
Shane could have gotten defensive. Six months ago he would have. Instead he crossed the room and stood in front of the man and made himself say the hard true thing, which he was bad at, which cost him.
"It's not fair," Shane said. "What you have to do and what I have to do. It's not the same and it's not fair and I'm not going to pretend it is." His voice was not steady. "And I hate that I get the home and you get the empty apartment. I think about it. I think about it more than you know."
Ilya stared at him.
"I don't know how to fix it yet," Shane said. "I'm working on it. The whole thing, the coming out, the timing, all of it, I'm working on it even when it looks like I'm not. But tonight I can't fix it. Tonight all I've got is... I see it. I see what it costs you. You're not crazy and you're not asking for too much and I see it."
The room was very quiet. The fire ticked. Outside the snow had started again, soft and straight down, filling in the porch light.
"You see it," Ilya said.
"I see it."
And the fight went out of him all at once, the big body sagging. Ilya crossed the last step and put his face down in Shane's neck and stood there, breathing, holding on. Shane held him up. That was a thing he could do with his body even when he could not do it with words. He got his arms all the way around the man and held on and felt him shake once and go still.
"I do not want a fight," Ilya said into his neck. "On the last night. I do not want to waste it on a fight."
"We're not. This isn't a waste." Shane turned his head and kissed his temple. "Come to bed. The actual bed. We did the couch enough."
They did the actual bed.
It was slow this time, slower than the couch, slower than any of the snowed-in days, because it was the last night and they both knew it and neither would say it. Ilya took his time. He took Shane apart like he only did when there was no clock, mapping him with his mouth, every old familiar place and a few new ones. Shane came undone under it, wrecked and shaking, saying things into the dark he could not say in daylight. The furnace could not beat the cold and it did not matter. Ilya ran hot. Ilya was a furnace himself, always ran hot. Shane pressed against all that heat and let himself be taken care of, slow and complete. A bed under three quilts his grandmother made, in a buried house at the end of a road no one could drive.
After, they lay tangled, Shane's cold nose against Ilya's throat, Ilya's heart going slow under his palm, the snow ticking at the black window.
"Your nose is cold," Ilya said.
"Everything's cold. The furnace is from the eighties."
"Put it somewhere else."
"No." Shane pressed it deliberately into the warm join of Ilya's neck and Ilya jerked and swore in Russian and Shane laughed, the real laugh, the one no camera had ever caught. "You said somewhere else. This is somewhere else."
"You are a child."
"You love it."
Ilya's hand came up and found the back of Shane's head and held it, fingers in his hair. The laugh went quiet and left the big thing behind, the one Shane could never say fast.
"I do," Ilya said. And then, because it was the dark and there was no one and he could, the straight version, no code: "I love you."
Shane felt it land in his chest and could not get the same words back up his own throat, not fast, not ever fast. It was not how he was built. Ilya knew that, had known it for eleven years, and did not push. But Shane could say the other thing. He had learned it from the master.
"You're so boring," Shane said into the warm dark of Ilya's neck. "You snore. You leave the window open in January. You cry at dog commercials."
He felt Ilya go still, and then felt him understand, felt the big body shake once with a laugh that was not really a laugh.
"That is my line," Ilya said, wrecked.
"I'm borrowing it. You're boring. You're the most boring man I've ever met." Shane kissed his jaw. "I mean it."
"I know what you mean." Ilya's arm came all the way around him and pulled him in tight, and his voice was thick. "I know exactly what you mean."
"Tomorrow we have to dig out the truck," Shane said into the dark.
"Tomorrow is not real yet."
"It's pretty real. Jacques might come."
"Jacques is a myth. There is no Jacques. There is only the house, and the fire, and you, and me, and no one." Ilya's voice was going under, sleep taking it. "Five days I had this. You said it is mine. The keeping of it."
"It's yours."
"Then I keep it." His arm tightened. "Even in the apartment. Even on the phone. Even on the ice when I cannot look at you. I keep this. The lake that talks. The bad eggs. You said I am in the story."
"You're in the story."
The lake groaned, far off, getting stronger. Ilya did not flinch at it this time. That was its own small mercy, a person learning to stop fearing a sound once someone they trust has named it.
The snow kept falling on the buried truck and the frozen lake. It fell on the small bright house with two of the most watched men in the country inside it, watched by no one at all.
Inside, the light stayed on a while.
And then it didn't.