Chapter Text
Ilya Rozanov is not a morning person. He never has been, and he doesn’t expect that he ever will be. But somehow, waking up before the sun is even properly in the sky doesn’t feel so spectacularly awful when the first sensation he becomes aware of is the steady rhythm of soft, warm breaths against his own face.
He cracks his eyes open (something he would never, ever find himself compelled to do if he were anywhere else at this hour) and is rewarded with the sight of Shane, hair-mussed up and mouth slightly open, curled loosely on his side in a posture mirroring Ilya’s own. He’s bare from the waist up, his skin comfortably warm where Ilya’s hand apparently splayed over his hip somewhere in the night, never able to get enough of touching this man, even in sleep.
The room is awash in a soft gray haze, casting everything in broad, monochromatic strokes and softening each feature at the edges. It feels like looking at a piece of art, he thinks at first, but then, no—that’s not quite right. It feels like being in a piece of art, like he’s woken up in the middle of a painting or a photograph somehow, somewhere he isn’t supposed to be.
He finds himself holding his breath for a moment, willing himself to be still lest the whole perfect moment shatter around him before he can drink it in. He soaks it up greedily, all at once: hungry for the details and the sensations and the feeling of it all, trying to commit every shard to memory so that he can hold onto it later, once it’s gone.
Once this is gone, whispers something in his head, and Ilya pushes it away. This was real, would keep being real after the moment had passed, after the Summer had passed.
Right?
He decides that it doesn’t matter much right now, either way. Whether this thing between them is destined to last forever or to go down in flames tomorrow, Ilya is certain that there’s no way he’d rather spend this moment: close and comfortable in Shane’s bed (in his home, his favorite place in the world), with this beautiful man sleeping in front of him, under his touch, looking so calm and safe and content that Ilya almost wishes he never had to wake up.
He’d gladly lie here forever, if he could, drinking in the sight of him, the feel of having him so close. The ability to enjoy either of those things still feels like such a luxury, and Ilya makes the most of it, raking his eyes slowly over Shane’s features. His face is softer in his sleep, and it makes him look younger; his eyelashes fanning down toward his cheekbones, almost tickling the smattering of freckles sprayed across them, and his mouth hanging slightly agape only add to the image.
Shane’s hands are gathered toward his chest, one curled around the hem of the sheet splayed half-over him and the other laying between their two bodies, the knuckles just brushing against Ilya’s pec when it expands with his inhales. Ilya resists the urge to shift forward into the touch, to have Shane’s hand pressed properly against his chest, to steal this little bit of contact for himself, a soft guilty pleasure he would enjoy now and then tuck away for later somewhere in his memory where no one can take it from him.
He’s pulled out of the thought by a little noise from Shane, Ilya’s eyes jumping back up to Shane’s still-shut ones, hunting for any signs of distress. His eyes stay shut, but his nose scrunches up just a little, his brows drawing together. Ilya wants to smooth out the wrinkles in both, and he doesn’t have much chance to caution himself against making the motion and risking waking him before Shane’s hands are groping blindly toward him.
“Ily,” he breathes, half asleep. The name comes rounded on a sigh, the second syllable little more than the suggestion of a sound, and Ilya is sure he’s never loved the sound of his own name so much. It sets something to fluttering in his chest, and that fluttering shifts into a frantic beating when Shane scoots forward a couple of inches to close the gap between their bodies and bury his face in the crook of Ilya’s neck, sighing happily. Ilya marvels at how perfectly they fit together like this, slotted into one another like puzzle pieces, like they’d been made for this: two halves carved from the same whole.
His bottom arm slips under Shane’s neck, the hand floating up to cup the back of his head almost automatically, holding him there, pressing him deeper. Ilya’s fingers slip between the soft strands of Shane’s hair and stay there as he presses a kiss against the top of his head.
“Here, lyubimyy,’’ he murmurs, more for himself than for Shane. “Am here.”
Shane’s head pulls back from Ilya’s neck, and he mourns the point of contact for just a moment before he’s treated to the sight of sleepy brown eyes opening against his chest, blinking blearily up at him. A soft smile spreads across Shane’s face as his gaze fixes on Ilya’s, and his heart starts to do funny things in his chest.
“You’re here,” Shane whispers, his smile spreading wider. He sounds like he can’t really believe it, and Ilya understands perfectly, because he can’t either. “We’re here.”
Shane’s hand comes up to rest against the side of his face, and Ilya turns into it to press a kiss to his palm. “We’re here,” he echoes softly, and for a moment they stay like that, content to soak in this moment of mutual reverie.
Ilya becomes aware, after a few moments, that Shane is pressing kisses across his collarbones and up his neck. They’re gentle and chaste, at first, but before long they turn hot and open-mouthed, and when Shane looks up at him, Ilya’s hand still carded through the hair at the back of his head, his lips are a bright, swollen pink and his eyes are glassy. There’s a flush to his cheeks, and Ilya doesn’t doubt that his own probably match.
“Ilya,” Shane breathes, his gaze at once feverish in its intensity and a million miles away. “I—fuck, I need—”
Ilya looks up at him, and he’s torn. He knows what Shane needs—knows how hard the words can be—, and he aches to soothe the strain in his voice, to give him what he craves without making him struggle for the words. But Ilya is a selfish man, and, god, he needs to hear it. Needs the reminder that this, them, is real.
“Need what, lyubimyy?” he asks finally, his voice gentle but firm. His hand slips from Shane’s hair to the side of his face, holding him gently, thumb brushing back and forth over his cheekbone. Shane’s eyes flutter shut and he leans happily into the touch. “Tell me.”
“I need you,” he whines, and Ilya’s heart swells right along with his cock. He’s sure there can’t be enough blood in his body to be pumping so hard in both places at once. “Need you in me. Need—fuck, need to feel you. Please.”
“Okay,” Ilya murmurs against his ear, because it’s all he can string together to say. Shane makes a plaintive, relieved noise against him, and Ilya wonders if he knows he’s incapable of denying him anything. He could ask for the moon on a string, for Ilya’s heart on a platter and Ilya would happily serve it to him on his knees.
Ilya twists one arm behind him to tug open the drawer of the night stand and rummage for a bottle of lube. He coats the fingers of the hand not still tucked under Shane’s neck and then snakes them down to press one against Shane’s hole. There’s a gasp against his neck when he presses against the tight ring of muscle there, and Ilya draws him in closer as he continues.
“Is okay?” he asks into Shane’s hair, even though the sounds he’s making are a pretty good indicator on their own.
Shane nods furiously. “Yeah, yes, it’s—oh, fuck, Ilya.” He breaks off into a moan as Ilya crooks his finger just so inside him, and Ilya grins. “Hurry, please? I need you so bad.”
Ilya groans. He works in a second finger, making quick work of what would be a much longer prep period if Shane weren’t still loose from their late-night sex the evening before.
Right after you said you loved him, the voice in Ilya’s head intones, and there’s something heady in the rush of memory. Right after he said it back.
“I love you,” Ilya says as he presses in the third finger, because suddenly he can’t bear not to say it, not to feel the words leave his own lips over again right here, now, in the breaking light of the morning so that he can know it wasn’t a dream. “Fuck, I love you.”
“I love you, too,” Shane pants, and the words shoot through Ilya like electricity, barreling down his spine and settling squarely in his dick.
Ilya draws back his fingers. “Roll over, lyubimyy,” he whispers, pulling Shane back up onto his side when he tries to go flat on his belly so that they’re spooned together instead. “Like this, okay? So I can see you, mm?”
If Shane picks up on how pleading the request comes out, he has the decency not to let on, allowing Ilya to position him the way he wants. Ilya lines himself up against Shane’s hole and presses slowly forward, and they both release a groan.
“Oh, fuck,” Shane says. “Fuck, you feel so good.” Then, after a moment, when their hips are flush together: “Fuck, I love you so much.”
“I love you,” Ilya tells him, and he tugs Shane’s arm backwards so that his upper body is twisted to lie flat against the bed. Shane’s hand floats up to weave into his hair. Ilya presses his face to the skin of Shane’s chest and just breathes there for a minute, both of them panting, soaking in the moment, the closeness. Finally, he starts to move with a few experimental thrusts, mouthing at whatever skin he can reach as he lifts his head to stare up at Shane and snakes his free arm across Shane’s thigh. He finds wide brown eyes already riveted to his own, and Ilya thinks he may actually combust under the sheer weight of the emotion written in them. He can’t tear his own eyes away.
“How did we let this happen?” Shane murmurs above him, and Ilya is too fucking gone to even huff a laugh.
“We were both very stupid,” he gets out. “And irresponsible.”
“This is real, though, right?” Shane asks, his hand suddenly gripping at Ilya’s knee, and for a moment Ilya forgets how to breathe, how to think, how to do anything but press himself further into this man who feels like safe and home and forever as his mind is overrun with a chant of realrealrealrealreal, so he nods heavily up at him and hopes his eyes and his hips can carry the weight of the rest of the message.
“Please fuck me,” Shane says, and, fuck, Ilya is lost to it in that moment. Lost to him. Shane’s grip in his hair tightens, presses him further down against his chest, and Ilya goes willingly, so willingly, the way he’d go anywhere for this man. He drives his hips forward harder, moving in earnest now, and Shane is letting out little breathy moans as Ilya sucks at his skin, consumed with the need to feel Shane everywhere, to taste him—and, fuck, it’s like Shane is reading his mind because the next thing Ilya knows there’s a warm hand pressed against his face and Shane’s thumb slipping into his mouth.
Ilya takes it in greedily, sucks on it as he moves until Shane pulls it away on a moan. Ilya’s head lolls forward, Shane’s grip in his hair following with it as he searches for something to fill the new emptiness in his mouth. He finds it in the form of Shane’s nipple, and Shane arches up into him as he sucks on it, his hands roaming Ilya’s chest and face with a kind of hunger that Ilya recognizes, squeezing and kneading and feeling everything within reach. Ilya lets him do it, presses into it gratefully, hopes the feel of him beneath Shane’s hands will be enough to say yes, this is real, so real, realrealrealreal in all the ways his mouth can’t.
Ilya doesn’t know how long they go on like that, wrapped up in each other and lost to the world. He wishes, privately, that this moment could last forever, that they could stay here melded together where everything felt good and no one and nothing else mattered. But he feels himself tightening, eventually, and knows there isn’t much longer that this can last.
Shane is still whimpering and groping at him when Ilya reaches around to find his weeping cock. He lets out a heavy breath as Ilya wraps his hand around it and begins to stroke him in time with his thrusts.
“Fuck, Ilya, I’m not—I’m gonna—”
“Me too,” Ilya soothes, mouthing at his neck. “Together, mm?”
“Yes,” Shane sobs, his hips stuttering forward against Ilya’s hand and then back against his cock. “Please. Yes.”
Ilya nips at the skin of his neck and Shane keens.
“I love you,” Shane says, and then he’s spurting into Ilya’s fist. Ilya works him through it, chasing his own orgasm to the sound of Shane chanting. “I love you, I love you, I love you,” he was saying, and Ilya wanted to drown in the sound of it, in the feeling of it, in the feeling of him.
“I love you,” he echoes on a groan as he feels himself starting to spill inside Shane. “I love you.”
And maybe it’s just the post-orgasm haze talking, but in this moment, sweaty and sated and collapsed together like this, Ilya is pretty sure that this is real.