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Ilya Rozanov is a menace who makes every Zumba class Shane Hollander attends a living Hell.
He's fucking charming with the old ladies--which, mind you, is approximately 80% of the class--and has an especially close relationship with a few of the ladies who come from the Russian retirement community a few blocks down the road. He seems to have no qualms with being adopted by a handful of babushka, being given more hard candies than his body could possibly have room for, having his cheeks pinched, playing translator. Ilya barely warms up, just saunters in five minutes before class starts, greeted to a small chorus of Ilyusha and the warm patter of friendly conversation at god damn ten in the morning. He proceeds to stand directly in front of Shane and fuck around the whole class like Zumba means nothing to him.
That's not to say that he's doing it wrong, no. He's doing everything perfectly. Every instance of "fuck around" is simply a flourish, an extra turn, a funny face to get a giggle out of one of the ladies. He shakes his ass perfectly, and then some.
And then some.
He has to be doing it on purpose, right? Shane no longer makes eye contact with him--he learned that lesson the hard way (ahem, pun unintended), catching his eyes once mid-song and having tripped over his own feet immediately after, only to have been caught by the menace himself. Are you okay, he asked in that stupid, sexy accent of his, to which Shane could only nod and immediately pretend that nothing happened while furiously trying to think of anything other than Ilya's hand having been on the small of his back. He no longer makes eye contact with him, but he can't stop looking at every other fucking thing he does. He keeps making these little fruity gestures. He winks. He shakes his ass. His perfectly-sculpted ass, why the fuck is he taking Zumba at 10AM on a Tuesday? What is the purpose of the Zumba class in what is presumably his amazing workout routine?
(The purpose of the Zumba class in Shane's meticulous workout routine is that, according to his team's trainer, he needs to learn to move more lightly and needs to work on his rhythm. He's fine, but moving to Ottawa from Montreal, he has to be ready to adjust to their more flexible play style, one that depends on actually working with your teammates and adapting to where they are rather than brute forcing every problem. Try a dance class, he was told. He tried it once, heard a song that he vaguely remembers from high school, and decided the music was catchy enough to keep going at it.)
It doesn't matter. Ilya's not even fucking doing Zumba right! He isn't taking it seriously! Is their 10AM Tuesday Zumba class a fucking game to him?
"Hey," he calls before class starts, in the maybe thirty seconds or so he has where he's not chatting with his troupe of babushka, "You ready to be left in dust, Inoue?" In the interest of anonymity, trying to hide that he is, in fact, the Shane Hollander that plays for the Ottawa Centaurs, he has chosen to keep this membership under his mother's maiden name. It seems to work, or at least everyone around them has the common sense to not say anything. Ilya stumbles over the pronunciation, trying to get the accent right and failing, which somehow only helps to endear him to Shane even more.
"Fu--" Before he can utter the word fuck, he receives a glare from Ms. Macleod, a sweet pensioner, former schoolteacher, who normally stands to the left of him, "In your dreams, Rozanov."
"You are there? I dream well, then."
"What does that even mean? Pay attention, class is starting." And start it does.
Ilya, as per usual, is a menace. He has no business looking as good as he does. He's wearing an outfit that he has to assume was assembled by his most divorced friend--a neon pink tank top that reads "YOLO - You Only Swag Once", just short enough for peeks at his stomach whenever he lifts his arms, baby blue sweatpants, and then sneakers that are somehow both simultaneously leopard print and bright yellow. It's an affront to polite society. No human being, especially not a grown man, should be wearing this combination, but to Ilya, it's a normal Tuesday morning thing to wear, apparently. (Shane is wearing a black shirt, black leggings, and white sneakers. This is fashion, he has been told.) He also has absolutely no business being as good as he is. Even his mistakes turn into little flourishes, little points of torture for Shane to suffer about later.
Each break, Ilya takes a sweet moment to egg him on in vaguely-suggestive ways. Move your hips more, he says. No, no, step this way, shows more of butt. He says "butt" instead of "ass" like it makes anything better, but still murmurs it so that they can't scandalize any of the women old enough to be their mothers. You should act more sultry, is more fun that way. Like it's that easy.
Seriously. It's not fair. The best part of watching Ilya is that he looks like he's having fun with it, like he's revelling in the fact that this is a judgement-free space and taking full advantage of it. He plays around like he doesn't have a job and taxes and a spouse and a home and a dog--he mentions the dog a few times, my Anya, perfect young woman. Shane just uses the class time to fully unmask and not perform facial expressions for 45 minutes of his day, not...whatever Ilya is doing. He's sure it's very fun to watch; Shane, completely expressionless, moving in perfect sync with Ilya, completely earnest in every step. It makes him feel like a crazy person.
Then, he has the absolute gall to turn, catch his gaze, and wink at him in perfect time with a pelvic thrust. Shane's face goes bright red and he wishes, desperately, that there was a good window nearby to jump out of. The bastard.
The locker room, after, is deserted except for the two of them. Good.
"The fuck is your problem? Stop fucking shaking your ass at me in the middle of class." No kind old ladies here to scold him for swearing, no. Nobody to hide his identity from--they've pretended not to know each other here, Shane because he's insistent on trying to be anonymous, Ilya because he seems to think that roleplaying like this is wonderful foreplay. The whole thing was an accident, neither of them having known that the other had signed up here, but they've decided to take the whole thing in stride.
"It is proper part of dance. You want me to wiggle ass at Ms. Petrova? She is a widow, Hollander." He definitely has no problem with any of this, he just wants to see Shane mad, part of this insane mating ritual. "You want me to shake my ass at widow?"
"It's Hollander-Rosanov. Get the double-barrelled name right." Ilya's is the opposite, Rosanov-Hollander, because of fucking course it is. (And because it made jerseys a bit easier.) "I want you to shake your ass at no one."
"Not even at you? Why, you were hard, weren't--" Ilya doesn't even bother to make eye contact, opting to just look down. Damn these leggings and their insistence on keeping no secrets. A smirk. "Present tense."
"Shut the fuck up. Where did you learn that? Shut the fuck up." Shane is having a capital C Crisis about this, much to Ilya's eternal joy. "Stop fucking smiling. They can't know I'm gay. They can't know that we're gay. If this got out, we'd--"
"We'd?" This is not really an issue for Shane. The other ladies are, honestly speaking, not a big problem. They probably wouldn't be outright unaccepting, and a few are definitely trying to hint to Shane that it's okay to be gay, probably having picked up on his deliberate use of the word partner rather than husband when asked about the ring on his finger. However, Ilya's squadron of babushka, his babushquadron, as approximately nobody would say, would almost certainly have words about him being married to a man, even more so that if they learned that it was Shane of all men, he thinks. They don't dislike Shane, Ilya has reassured, but think that he's too serious, and maybe have had a few choice words about his turning down their hard candies and baked goods. Not like good boy Ilyushka, Ms. Popova would say, Ilya preening at the praise like he was an elementary schooler and not a grown adult man who was being compared to his husband.
Being loved by Russian grandmothers is a competition sport that Ilya is winning gold in. He's visited them at their homes, traded off Russian books and magazines he was able to get special-ordered in exchange for baked goods, even gone to church with them on a few major holidays. (Seeing his cross, they assume he's properly Orthodox, and he can't find it in him to tell the truth. He quickly lies and says that he goes to a church out in Kanata, closer to their house. They don't question it, usually just understand, maybe talk about how their own children and grandchildren, born and raised in Canada, don't celebrate the Russian way anymore.)
The Russian way is kind of how they got into this mess, really. The idea of finding a Russian community was originally suggested by his therapist, maybe not in as many words, maybe not necessarily by way of befriending a group of old women, but started after a conversation about his relationship with their home country. It's not a country he's aching to return to, no, not a country he particularly has connections to anymore, but it's still the country that raised him, still the one whose passport he has, at least for another year or so until he can apply properly for Canadian citizenship, still the country whose culture is buried deep in his memory. His thoughts are in Russian, all of his points of reference on how to act are Russian. As westernized as he might become, a lover of most Canadiana (butter tarts with raisins in them are on thin fucking ice), he still will always have a piece of Russia in him.
Until a few years ago, he'd return there in the summers, and he had a Russian community in Boston in the form of Svetlana, in the form of Russian teammates who would banter with him or invite him over on holidays, make remarks about celebrating Christmas and Easter on the proper days or about English being a hell language that makes no sense. There are no other Russians on the Centaurs to do this with, Svetlana is still in Boston, and even if his public coming out and marriage to another man hadn't made him persona non grata, he has no reason to return. It's lonely. In his lowest moments, he'll find a livestream on Youtube, literally of anything, and just sit with it running to hear the language again. Not understanding, just to hear the familiar sounds.
So, they've agreed that it's good for him. Ilya has moved so much of his life to fit within Shane's bubble, so having somewhere to go that's a bit more like home, where he can speak Russian--vernacular, regionally-accented Russian, not "unaccented, no turns of phrase, slightly slowed so that my learner husband can understand" Russian--and have friends that aren't necessarily Shane's friends is important. The fact that none of the ladies seem to know he's a hockey player is an added bonus. They just know that he is married to a Canadian and travels a lot for work, not that he's married to a Canadian man or that his work travel is when he and his husband play hockey games around the continent. (One day, when pressed, Ms. Titova, a woman who Ilya thinks must be a hundred years old, will admit that she thought he was a lawyer. Who on Earth, Shane would think, would want Ilya Rosanov representing them in a court of law?) So, though he wishes he could spend every waking moment with his husband, to make up for the years they were separated, and though he wishes they could truly be open about who they are to everyone, he understands. The smile on his face when he gets to gossip in Russian with them, giggling like schoolgirls, the bittersweet confession that he nearly forgot how to hand-write the Cyrillic alphabet until he started writing letters as thanks for sweets and company on holidays, it's enough to make Shane acquiesce as much time as Ilya needs.
Scott Hunter--neither of them are particularly happy about this admission, realizing this by listening to fucking Scott Hunter, of all people--was talking at them (not to them, because Ilya, especially, was not listening at all, just passively taking in the words and internalizing them like a good boy) about coming out and making a remark about how coming out is not a one and done, hey, I'm here, but a continuing process. Every person you meet, every time someone says your wife instead of husband or partner when they see a wedding ring, every time is a new coming out, and it is a personal decision whether or not to disclose at that time.
Ilya made that decision the first time he met them, and mulls over whether or not to come out every time after. His first time lying about his relationship was almost certainly a childhood response awakened deep from his psyche, he tells his therapist later, having been used to hiding anything about himself that could even remotely be considered undesirable after the death of his mother. While speaking Russian means that he is free of the confines of translating everything in his head, hoping that his intent is shown in whatever words he chooses, he gets the cultural confinement instead, the feeling that if he shows something normally considered unacceptable, he'll be cast out again, back to square one with a little extra heartbreak on the side. So, back into the closet Ilya Rozanov goes, at least with these ladies, or at least back to lying by omission. He uses the word wife, but mainly tells the truth about Shane otherwise--beautiful, Japanese-Canadian, tries very hard to speak Russian but has a poor accent. (In hindsight, this does not help protect Shane's anonymity at the gym one bit.) He tells of them meeting at work, not necessarily a lie by itself, that they used to work separately for a long time but are now working and living together in Ottawa. How romantic, they'd say, and who is Ilya to say that it's not?
Either way, Ilya is still smirking at seeing Shane half-hard through his leggings. They truly do not leave much to the imagination, something that Ilya will never complain about. He reaches down, places a hand on the inside of Shane's thigh, ready to trail further up, only to be stopped by a call from outside the locker room.
"Ilyusha, are you finished? I have pirozhki for you and your wife." Shane vaguely recognizes the voice to be from Ms. Orlova, a woman who Ilya says grew up in the same part of Moscow as him, fifty years earlier, and picks up about half of what she's saying in Russian. He frowns up at him, knowing that wife is, in fact, referring to him, and that pirozhki is not something that he's keen on ending this for.
"Yes, I'm coming now!" He calls in response, much to Shane's indignation, though not before reaching up and giving his crotch one good squeeze. He groans, a bit useless under his touch. "When we are home, I will do something about this." He pulls his hand away, and Shane wants to grab it and put it back himself, communal locker room be damned.
"You're really going to leave your husband over pirozhki? When I--" Pause. He looks at Ilya's face for a grand total of one second, then shakes his head. "Don't answer that, actually."
"I will fix when we are home, promise. Many pirozhki for you." Shane will maybe have half a bite of one and they both know it, but he doesn't seem to protest. "Gimme kiss."
"Text me when you leave. And I have to stop at Farm Boy, so I'll be later than usual." Shane says with a roll of his eyes, giving Ilya a chaste kiss and allowing him to plant a few extra on both cheeks, for good measure. Luckily for both of them, talking about Farm Boy is an instant boner killer, so that problem resolves itself until later. "Love you."
"Love you, too. Always."
In between Zumba classes, the two of them manage to win the Cup. How that happens is not important, though it definitely is great, great enough that the two of them kiss about it in front of a few dozen cameras, Ilya skating an entire lap around the rink carrying his husband in his arms, powered purely by adrenaline, the two of them a mess of laughter and tears. Pictures of the celebration show up in just about every form of media for the next few days, so in theory, they really shouldn't be surprised.
"Ilyusha!" Shane hears the calls as he stretches, having already been here for a solid fifteen minutes before Ilya. Staggered arrivals, they had privately stressed, though Ilya also just doesn't seem to care as much about warming up for a 45-minute aerobics class. He looks up, and one of them--Ms. Volkova, he remembers--is holding the local Russian periodical, a picture of one of their many Stanley Cup kisses on the front page. Shane, face reddened, ducks down.
"Our Ilyusha is a hockey man!" Another one of them says in Russian, acting like he's a kid who just got a good grade on a test rather than a grown man who has won one of hockey's greatest achievements for the third time. Shane doesn't pick up on all of it with his limited grasp on the language, but he tries his best, carefully watching as Ilya visibly tenses, obviously expecting to be put through the wringer about having concealed his and Shane's relationship. "With a very handsome husband!" Well, they're being nice about it, at least. He can see Ilya's posture deflate in relief from where he sits. "Ilyusha, this husband is your wife who cannot cook Russian food?" Sorry, what?
"It's true. He only eats food for birds. I am starving every day." Ilya has no interest in saving face, it seems, but he's beaming in a way that makes Shane unable to care.
Ms. Popova takes this to heart, strides over to Shane, puts a hand on his shoulder. "You come with Ilyushka to church Sunday. After, I teach you how to make blini, be good husband."
Ms. Popova does exactly as promised. They go to the service, three hours with no break to sit down, despite neither of them particularly believing in the contents. Shane quickly learns that this is a very small price to pay for being taken back to her apartment, sentences quickly shifting between Russian and, occasionally remembering that Shane isn't that good at it yet, English. She barks orders at him while they're cooking, hellbent on making sure that he commits this all to memory.
Soon, others are coming, too, filing in from other apartments, helping, doting. Shane has his cheeks pinched twice, given plenty of unsolicited advice. They are asked more about when they will be having children in these few hours than they've been asked for their entire marriage. No good having children if you can't feed them properly, Ms. Titova says, in all her ancient wisdom, Come next week, I will teach you more. Ilya just laughs, a pink tinge to his cheeks that he hasn't seen from him in months.
The dinner they eat is definitely not part of his diet plan. It's more than he would normally eat, too, usually would say something about his macros to get out of eating more than the bare minimum, but he can't help it, the way they talk to him. You can't be good at hockey if you don't eat, no cups for you, someone says, Ilya translating with a smirk.
The apartment is crowded, warm, full of love, and all at once, Shane knows that this, too, is Ilya's home, and that he's happy to be home with him.