Chapter Text
JUNE 2010, LOS ANGELES
The hotel was nice. At least, nicer than what he was used to.
Ilya didn’t stay in hotels often. Unless he could stay with Sveta, he usually opted for travel that could get him in and out of a place as quickly as possible, cutting out the need to pay for an overnight stay. It had meant many hours spent at airports, waiting in uncomfortable chairs, only to get in an uncomfortable airplane seat for anywhere from two to eight hours, sometimes more.
But Vika had made a great deal for the shoot this time. Hotel and travel on top of the regular compensation, she had said.
He hoped it had been part of the deal she had made, at least. It wouldn’t have been the first time she’d paid for something out of her own pocket for him, though he’d told her not to do it anymore. That he’d drop her and find a new agent if she ever did it again. Both of them knew it was an empty threat.
It was a good hotel, though. A bit corporate, but clean. There was space between the bed and the window, enough for a small couch to fit. The bed was big—a king size, for once. He’d napped off the flight, stretching his limbs out across the whole expanse, taking up all the room he wanted after six hours squeezing his long limbs and bulky frame into an economy seat.
When he’d ventured downstairs to find food, though, the downside had arrived with the force of a punch to the face.
They were all over the place, the NHL prospects—thick-bodied and empty-headed, squeezed into the polo shirts and khakis they wore to look presentable in case they ran into anyone from the teams or the league. Another sign of idiocy: nobody important would be staying here. They’d be at the Four Seasons, the Beverly Hilton, any of the other assorted luxury choices to be found outside of downtown Los Angeles.
This was a place for well-off parents, cloistering their spoiled little boys for a few more nights in a middle-market business hotel, before they lost them to the inevitable cascade of brain injuries and sex addiction that would greet them in the NHL. If they made it in at all.
Weaving through all of them and their happy families made him almost wish that he had been stuck in some shitty two-star hotel, instead.
Ilya didn’t dwell on hockey. Most of the time it was a relief to be away from it: the pressure, the anger, the squeezing exertion of authority.
What he was doing now was harder, in many ways. The path was less certain. And despite what his father said, it was no more or less frivolous than hockey: both were putting his body out to the public for consumption. One just took a lot more beatings while doing it.
It was different today, when he added up the math. Today would have been his draft day, too.
If he had kept playing, he had no doubt that he would be staying here, too, buttoned-up, clean and proper, eyeing up his competition, full of the confidence—earned or not—that every single one of them would be chosen after him.
It left him with a strange, sour feeling. Not regret. Not jealousy. It felt almost like grief—Ilya was familiar with grief. Grief for the person he once was, for the person he could have been.
So—best not to dwell.
He returned to his room with a handful of energy bars and a few bags of chips that he figured would work for dinner. He sat on his bed with the food spread around him, and told himself that he wouldn’t watch the draft.
His self-control made it until approximately forty seconds before the program started, and he changed the channel from whatever bullshit he’d been pretending to watch. He would just see who got picked first, and then he’d turn it off. That would be it.
He kept it muted through the blustering speeches and other inane bullshit the American network played before they actually got to the point. He watched, in between bites of a bar that tasted like cardboard, as they finally announced the first overall pick.
A shell-shocked boy with black hair, awkward in his suit, pasted on a fake smile as he stood between the Commissioner and the GM of the team that had taken him. His hair was terrible. But he had a nice face, Ilya noticed.
It was a surprising face for hockey, with his wide, brown eyes, and long, straight nose. Never broken, Ilya assumed. His lips were thick, too. Plush. He would have fit in well at any of the jobs Ilya was doing these days—certainly better than any of the locker rooms he had ever been in.
He heard the name, Shane Hollander, and wondered for a moment why it sounded familiar.
The memory came back quickly enough: his old teammates, Max and Dima, griping after World Juniors in 2008 and 2009. Two losses in a row, the same culprit both times.
Shane Hollander, they had complained to Ilya. They treat him like a fucking god and he’s not even half as good as you. You would have fucking crushed him.
They had said other things, too, but he had stopped listening. He’d been confused, thinking they had been saying Jane. He had wondered what kind of name that was for a boy.
Well, he thought, as he changed the channel from the grimacing boy standing between two old men to something else—American baseball, only slightly more interesting than what he had been watching before. Congratulations to Shane Hollander.
It was a lot easier to be number one when there wasn’t any real competition.
Napping in the afternoon had been a stupid idea, though. He was still awake much later that night, watching some crime procedural now, getting hungry again. He didn’t want to order overpriced room service—he wouldn’t have known how to pay for it, and he wasn’t so sure that he should eat, either.
He had started to think about his body differently lately. It made him feel strange.
He had always been comfortable enough in his body. Maybe more accurate to say that he was comfortable with what his body could do for him: speed and strength on the ice; pleasure off it. The ice wasn’t a factor anymore, but he didn’t doubt his solidity.
But his focus had been on performance, sensation. What made his thighs burn, how to stop his thighs from burning, what made his dick hard, what to do with his body when his dick was hard. Recently, it had stopped being about simply a feeling or the execution of skill—his focus on his body had turned to how it looked, too.
It didn’t feel like vanity. There was a coldness to it, a calculation. Ilya looked at himself the way he knew others would look at him when booking him for a job. There was a small voice in his head, cruel sometimes but keenly observant nonetheless, that did the work he needed, naming the flaws that someone would immediately identify. Mimicking their judgment and appraisal, he found, blunted some of its power.
It gave him, he had come to realize, a little bit of an edge. So he kept his sharp corners on full display when he went into bookings now, letting them see the bit of challenge in him, the defensiveness. They always seemed to like it.
And in any case, he wasn’t treating his body any differently than he had before. He was working out nearly as much he had when he was playing hockey, keeping himself fit in the same ways. There was less time on the ice, to be sure, but he made up for it on the treadmill, in the weight room.
That was a good idea, he realized. Tire himself out, expend the energy again, and have the benefit of a last workout before tomorrow’s shoot. He shifted off the bed, gathering the food wrappers to toss into the garbage, and went to find his gym clothes.
He had pushed open the door and made it all the way inside before he realized that someone was already there. Even from a passing glance at the physique he could tell it was a hockey player—thick thighs pumping on a stationary bike, bulky arms braced on the bars above.
The last fucking thing Ilya wanted was to deal with one of these empty-headed fuckers right now. He was half a step from turning around to exit the way he had just come, when he noticed a dark-eyed glare swoop in his direction.
All Ilya saw was a glimpse of the big, brown eyes peeking over the shoulder of a compression shirt—they were gone before he could make contact.
It was Hollander.
Ilya paused. There was no reason for it; Hollander shouldn’t have been any more interesting to him than any of the people who had been selected 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 tonight. Admittedly, he didn’t know any of their names, so perhaps that was enough to distinguish him.
The pause made Hollander look up again, this time for longer. He turned his head to look at Ilya directly, trying, perhaps, to identify him as another league prospect. Ilya, however, was distracted.
He had already learned earlier today that Shane Hollander had a perfect face. But the television had not shown him the freckles.
He was getting on the second bike before he realized what his legs were doing.
So what if he sat directly next to him as half challenge, half delirium at the sight of one of the most gorgeous people he had ever seen, a smooth, lush face with fucking freckles all over it, currently furled into a funny, agitated scowl? It was a gym. People were allowed to use the equipment they wanted at the gym.
Sitting on the bike next to him, though, he quickly felt it.
There was a simmering kind of vibration coming off the boy next to him. He didn’t even need to look at him—though he did, every once in a while, just to see. But he could simply feel it in the air, directed out from the boy, directed towards Ilya.
Focus, intensity, adrenaline. It was a familiar combination, a little concoction that made Ilya feel like the back of his neck was buzzing as he pushed his legs on the bike next to Shane Hollander. He used to feel that very same buzz once before, all on his own.
Oh, he thought. You want to be one of the great ones.
I used to want that too.
The thought pushed his legs to go faster. And when Hollander looked up at him again, Ilya smiled.
When they stumbled off the bikes, Hollander looked for a moment like he might vomit on the floor of the gym.
Ilya threw himself down onto the mat directly across from him, beaming at the exertion, at the competition, at the look of frustration he had drawn out of the little prince in front of him.
He took a sip of water, allowing himself a moment for his heart rate to come down while he examined Hollander. His face was red and sweaty, his chest was heaving. His short hair spiked up in every direction. He was even prettier from this close.
“Woo!” Ilya said, his thick accent wrapping up the words as he spoke. “What a fucking city, huh?”
Shane Hollander was fun to fuck with. He was flustered, Ilya could tell as the conversation went on. His eyes couldn’t stay in one place.
Ilya’s face. The weight rack next to him. Ilya’s throat. The kettlebells. Ilya’s face again. The exercise ball in the corner. Ilya’s dick.
Ah.
It happened a second time, after Hollander had scoffed and said, “You didn’t beat me and we weren’t racing.”
Hollander’s eyes flickered down, between Ilya’s open thighs.
Ilya was seized with the urge to push him backwards onto the mat and get his tongue in his mouth. He had a feeling, too, that Hollander’s muscular legs would open up to welcome the effort before wrapping around his waist.
But when Hollander told him that he would be going to New York, Ilya felt something different settle over him. He hadn’t been paying enough attention to the television—he hadn’t noticed the team, hadn’t cared to remember the details of the jersey he’d seen Hollander hold up for the camera.
The feeling wasn’t fate—he didn’t believe in it. But nor was it coincidence, because Ilya wasn’t sure he believed in those, either. The feeling settling over him seemed like a chance, and Ilya had always been very good at stealing chances, plucking them straight out of thin air and turning them into treasure. It was one of the things that had made him a very good hockey player.
He took the first one a short time later, passing his water bottle over their legs, taking care to brush the tips of his fingers lightly over the back of Hollander’s hand. Hollander’s eyes jumped up straight to Ilya’s, then back down to his dick.
He had big hands, with long fingers. They looked elegant, but strong. Watching them wrapped around the water bottle, Ilya could imagine them wrapped around a hockey stick. He could imagine them wrapped around his dick.
“More,” Ilya said, because Hollander’s face was still red, and he had barely had any water.
He went back to his room soon after that, leaving Ilya to the free weights, half hard, and with Shane Hollander’s phone number burning in his pocket.
Ilya thought about him for hours afterwards. It might have been pathetic, perhaps, but it didn’t feel that way. He was grinning, actually, when he did a quick set of exercises for his arms and chest, and while he was in the shower after, and then again in his bed, finally getting his hand on his cock. He was thinking of his eyes, his mouth, and even his nose, smattered with those fucking freckles. It took only minutes.
He wondered if Hollander had done the same thing in his room. He thought so—Ilya had a good sense for these things.
The sense seemed confirmed, too, when he ran into Hollander in the elevator the next morning.
He hadn’t expected to see him, or to see anyone; he’d been preoccupied with the need to get into a car and make his way to the photoshoot. He was worried that he hadn’t left enough time with everything he’d heard about LA traffic.
He thought that his eyes might have been as wide as Hollander’s as he walked into the elevator, but Ilya was quicker to normalize. Hollander continued to blink at him like a wide-eyed baby deer hiding in the skin of a jock.
And yes, Ilya could see, from the faint flush creeping into Hollander’s cheeks, that last night’s encounter had had an effect on him too. Ilya wondered if he had been in the shower or in his bed when the full effect had spilled out of him.
The elevator ride could not have been more than thirty seconds, certainly under a minute, but still—it was enough for Ilya to feel the intensity again, the shift of energy between them, as Hollander tried to chirp him, not once, but twice. He was fucking terrible at it, and he looked miserable when Ilya responded in kind.
For the first time in a long time, Ilya wondered. What would it have been like to look up from the ice and see him looking back?
So Ilya plucked another chance out of the air, brushing his hand against Hollander’s as he left the elevator, this time without the excuse of a water bottle between them. He felt the tremor from Hollander, a small shift in the air behind him before he entered the lobby.
If this was the last time he ever saw or heard from the hockey prince, he was sure he had left an impression.
_____
OCTOBER 2010, NEW YORK CITY
He showed excellent self control after that, by waiting for Hollander to text him. Which he fucking didn’t, even by the time Ilya moved to New York in September.
It was strange to have one place to live, after the in-between space he had occupied for nearly three years now, constantly moving between cities and houses. Svetlana’s home in Boston. Hostels in various cities he visited for a few days or maybe a week. His father’s house in Moscow, which may as well have been any random government building in the city for the treatment and consideration he received there. Any other places he could, for the time he could be there.
The place in New York was familiar to him, too—he had spent many nights in this very apartment already, since Svetlana’s family had bought it for her almost two years ago as a soft landing for when she was working in New York.
It bothered him that she was moving to LA just as his visa had come through, just as he was ready to settle himself in New York like they had talked about for over a year. But a part of him understood, too.
Svetlana wasn’t like him. She was beautiful, of course; he was only doing this now because she had led him into it by the elbow, yanking him along with her even when he faltered and she was rising higher. But all of her actions were against the backdrop of a family that would not only catch her if she fell, but would build her the ladder to help her climb higher. Ilya’s family, such that it was, was standing next to him with a saw.
He understood that she was tired of traveling cross-country—or at least wanted to change her view for a little while, as she moved from coast-to-coast. He could understand, too, the call of the California sunshine after a youth spent in the cold misery of Moscow and Boston.
Part of him had considered whether he should ask to go with her. But he didn’t like LA, he had realized, the few times that he had spent more than a few days there. He didn’t want to get a driver’s license, he didn’t want to struggle surrounded by other beautiful, struggling people.
There were lots of people who struggled in New York. It was different, though. They hid it better, maybe, or they didn’t shy away from it, the way that the eager, fresh faces in LA did. There was a shamelessness, or a viciousness, that made him uncomfortable in LA. In New York, people seemed to simply exist, and allow the people beside them to exist the way that they wanted to, too. Ilya liked it.
Still, he was sad not to have Sveta’s company. But he was thankful for her generosity with the apartment.
She had taken care to remove all of her things, leaving only the furniture and other utilitarian necessities: pots, curtains, olive oil. She had even taken the sheets and towels.
This had shocked him on the first night: he had gotten naked and wet in the shower before he discovered it, and had been forced to dry off on a sweatshirt. He didn’t even know where to buy fucking sheets and towels. But he didn’t begrudge her; he understood that this was her way of inviting him to make the space his own home.
But was it that? A home? If Ilya was only moving into a home now, then it meant that he had been homeless these past three years.
Maybe, yes. Maybe he was running away from a label that had already suited him for a long time. In which case, there was nothing for him to do except be grateful to Svetlana and her family for giving him this, and to find somewhere to go and buy sheets.
Shane Hollander hadn’t texted him, but he hadn’t stopped thinking about Shane Hollander.
He didn’t know which was more embarrassing: the fact that he did it so much, or the fact that he knew it was loneliness that was driving him to do it.
Whichever it was, Ilya couldn’t stop looking him up online. There was enough information to choose from, between the hockey forums and the profiles that had been written about him in advance of his rookie season in the league.
He was Canadian, from Ottawa, born May 10, 1991. Mother of Japanese-Canadian heritage, father of Boring-Canadian heritage. 5’11”, 190 lbs (86 kgs). He was best known for his speed and his shot accuracy, and he captained his team to two gold medals at World Juniors in 2008 and 2009, both games against Russia.
Ilya read through every stat available. They were pretty fucking good.
He was starting to wonder if he was almost working himself into a genuine interest in hockey as a fan when the most startling thing of all landed on a web page in front of him.
A fucking Rolex ambassador.
What the fuck would Rolex want with a nineteen-year-old hockey player who had just barely started his professional career, stunning though he may have been?
Ilya couldn’t believe it, actually. He stared at the single picture, contained in the page announcing Hollander as a new ambassador for the company.
His face was what it was, but everything else was horrifying. He was wearing a plain black suit, and absolutely nothing could be done to make his terrible haircut look any better. The watch was wearing him, completely. He may as well have had a mechanical fucking arm.
Ilya immediately picked up his phone to text him.
Hollander. Are you stealing my job.
[LINK: Rolex]
How the fuck did you book this
SH
Can’t give away my trade secrets.
The response arrived no less than fifteen seconds after Ilya’s third text. Ah. So he was curious, too.
They texted all the time after that. Ilya was usually the one to initiate, and he didn’t mind it—he spent a lot of time bored, waiting in uncomfortable chairs or on his couch, waiting for his next job.
He was lucky, he knew—there weren’t many other models (aspiring models? Was he aspiring? Did he aspire? Had Ilya ever aspired for anything in his entire life?) who had the benefit of sitting around and waiting for work without a second job as a server, or a bartender, or whatever other opportunities they could cobble together. If it hadn’t been for Svetlana and the apartment, he would have been one of them too.
But in this one way, at least, Ilya was lucky. And so, he spent a high percentage of his waiting time dedicated to a growing fascination with Shane Hollander. And he was becoming increasingly perturbed by it.
Was it about hockey? Was it the phantom of Ilya’s rookie season creeping up behind him that was causing this? Was Hollander simply an effigy that Ilya had built to hold all of the guilt and resentment that he pretended he didn’t still feel about walking away from it?
If that was an explanation, it didn’t account for the memory that came to him sometimes, perhaps even often. Wide, brown eyes, a creased forehead, a thick shoulder as he settled on the bike. The flushed face across from him, breathing hard as their hands touched around a bottle.
So he was fucking beautiful. There were other beautiful people in the world. Ilya had seen and fucked some of them recently, in fact. Being beautiful didn’t make Shane Hollander special.
_____
DECEMBER 2010, LOS ANGELES
But were there any other beautiful people who played such beautiful hockey?
He hadn’t intended to watch the game. He was just out of the shower after another long day in Los Angeles, another job that had required hours of waiting, standing, sweating, keeping his mouth shut, listening, turning, blinking, posing, changing his face, changing his body, waiting, waiting, waiting.
He was only here because Svetlana was in Paris, and then on her way to Moscow, and he couldn’t stay in her house because he didn’t drive and he had no idea how to get a fucking cab on his own in LA. The hotel was fine—not as nice as the one he had stayed at when he was here in June—but the bathroom was clean and the view of the sprawling lights and palm trees was nicer than the back of a building.
He was sprawled out on the bed, taking up as much space as he could on it, tired of feeling small and tightly coiled from the job all day today and from the flight from New York yesterday. He was flipping channels.
It would be lying to say anything stopped his attention other than Shane Hollander. He froze as soon as he saw him, the remote tilting down towards the bed as he stared at the television.
He was already mid-flight when Ilya switched the channel onto the game, HOLLANDER 24 emblazoned on the back of his white jersey in blue and red. He wove around the LA players scrambling after him, practically liquid as he soared across the ice.
He was a beautiful skater.
Ilya had not watched hockey, not really, since the last day he watched his own game tape. But he sat on the edge of his bed now, watching this game, the remote forgotten next to him.
He made a noise in his throat each time Hollander missed a shot, exhaled when an obvious trip against him wasn’t called. He leaned forward onto his elbows when Hollander stretched his stick out to receive a sloppy pass from a player who had no business being on a line with him.
Hollander was a ferocious player. Nobody had ever mentioned that before, not in anything he had ever seen or heard about him—Ilya only saw words about his Hockey IQ, how graceful he was, how he played with such good sportsmanship. It was all bullshit. Hollander was a terror: Ilya could see it in every movement.
When he scored, Ilya slapped the bed so hard the remote wobbled to the floor. He left it on the ground, watching Hollander pump one fist in the air, beaming at the teammates coming for him. When the bodies piled on top of him, his beaming smile was barely visible between the crush of white, red, and blue.
Ilya watched his second goal, too. He liked that one even more.
When the game finished, he felt like he had been wrung out. He wasn’t hard—he hadn’t been at any point, even when Hollander had ducked out from an attempt to check him into the boards and shot down the rink like he was made of fucking air. That wasn’t what the feeling had been.
It felt more like his body was burning. His thighs, his calves, his shoulders. A phantom pain, maybe, the memory of a shared experience.
He texted Hollander an hour after the game.
He didn’t think he would actually come. It wasn’t simple, after all—maybe it had been a dare, even. Sending him the name of a hotel and the room number: 1410.
He would have to travel through Los Angeles to get there from their fancier team hotel, in a taxi, probably, to come and meet someone who was still a stranger to him, who he had met for no more than twenty minutes, maybe, split between an elevator and a gym in a nice Marriott not far from here.
It was an extremely stupid idea, actually. Sheltered, perfect, boring Canadian Shane Hollander was surely too smart, or timid, to actually do it.
Then, at seven minutes past the hour, a knock.
Wow, brave.
He looked smug when he came in. Not obviously, not the way Ilya would have, if he’d just played a road game the way Hollander had, two months into his first season in the league. If it had been Ilya, he would have walked into the room, simply taken his dick out, and told him to get on his knees.
Hollander’s cockiness had a veneer over it, a gloss, like he was trying to pretend it was something other than it was. Like he was trying to convince the other person, Oh, I’m pretty good, when his entire body was screaming, that’s right, I really am that fucking great.
And Ilya felt it again, the rush of resentment—the sudden urge to take him down a peg, this boy who was only the best because Ilya had stopped trying to be.
He kissed him against the wall, seeking his tongue immediately. Hollander was sloppy—he hadn’t kissed many people, Ilya thought. But he didn’t mind the spit and the teeth he got along with Hollander’s soft lips. It was better to kiss someone hungry.
But then, Hollander dropped to his knees at a speed that made Ilya’s head rock back, and he suddenly wondered if he had misjudged him—the arrogant hockey prince, who Ilya would need to fight to crack open, bit by bit—and if there was more to be found underneath the surface.
Ilya would bet money (actual, American dollars, which he had very few of) that Hollander had never done this before. But he was grasping for it, clutching at him, and his mouth was warm, wet, and eager.
Ilya saw, suddenly, with his dick inching its way towards the back of Hollander’s mouth, the depth within him, just a glimpse of an aching, open soul.
He wasn’t just hungry, he was starving.
It made him so dizzy that he worried for a moment that he might come right there. He pulled Hollander up, quickly, wondering if he had somehow gotten this all wrong.
But then Hollander stood in front of him a few minutes later, naked, and Ilya saw something new again, all at once, like light refracting quickly off glass.
Ilya had imagined this body during all six months since he had first seen it, in this same city, but his imagination had not even come close to reality.
Every single inch of him was gorgeous—muscular legs, thick arms and chest, still a little boyish, maybe, but clear about the power he already had and would only gain more of over time. A round ass, which he wanted to slap, and spread apart. A big, perfect, curved cock, which Ilya was already impatient to get his hands on.
Hollander stood there in front of him with his arms out. Yeah, he said. I can see that you want me. They all do. I am the fucking best.
It was confident, it was arrogant, it was eager, it was open, it was starving. It was every one of those things at once, because, Ilya had now discovered, Shane Hollander was not one simple thing.
For the first time in four years, Ilya yearned to put on skates. He yearned to chase him until his legs were burning, to smash him into the boards before stripping the puck from him, and to make him scowl when he scored goal after goal after goal against him. He yearned to win a thousand faceoffs against him.
He settled for giving him, he thought, the strongest orgasm of his life.