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Ilya slowly knocks on the door. Heart threatening to burst, crawl out of his mouth, shatter into pieces of glass, and scatter across his vessel. Every knock feels like the tightness of his throat is getting more and more constricted. The needles surrounding it are being thrust deeper with every breath taken, with every emotion swallowed down. The lack of awareness or realization of what has happened within the last 4 hours is equal to a foggy morning in a cold winter. He remembers those hours in fragments. With every blink taken, he sees only this:
Shane being shoved to the walls by Cliff.
Ilya sprinting towards him.
Shane being taken away on a spinal board.
People holding back Ilya from getting closer towards Cliff in the locker room.
Ilya storming off the arena and heading towards the hospital.
This is all he recalls. He doesn’t remember how the game ends, frankly, he doesn’t even care. He doesn’t remember what exactly provoked him to deal with Cliff like that after the game. He isn’t sure how he rationalized his visit to the hospital before heading there. All he knew was that he had to make sure, he had to see that Shane was okay. That he was going to be okay. Not a single particle of his body would have been able to rest and sleep the tiredness off the game without knowing that Shane is breathing. Alive. In stereo. Not an inch of his mind would have been able to find a moment of solitude without seeing Shane’s eyes do this thing they do when he sees Ilya.
The thing about Shane, Ilya has studied over the years of their illicit meetings, he spoke with his eyes. Louder than his words. In fact, sometimes his eyes would tell the things he wouldn’t dare to utter with his mouth. And something they will always show without Shane’s consent is the fleeting spark that lights up when Ilya approaches his vicinity. His face manages to allegorically turn his mouth in a straight line, fight off a smile, while his eyes will turn into a crescent moon. Moon so bright and tender. So close and yet so far. That’s how Ilya would feel every time he would catch that look on him. He would read Shane’s soul deeply buried within him, but face the one that is fabricated on the surface level. The Shane that he offers to Ilya. A guard. A mask. A form of protection. A way to prevent hurt and anticipated heartbreak.
That was the thing about their clandestine rendezvous. They were doing it scared. They were doing it with fear. The fear of getting caught. The fear of breaking each other’s hearts. The fear of breaking their own hearts. But the fear of not doing anything at all prevailed. The mere thought of Ilya never being able to brush and map his lips across Shane’s skin equated to the moon never showing itself to the midnight sky again. It was selfish. But the possibility of never seeing him again put Ilya on a pedestal that he would never be able to pause.
And so, here he is, knocking on the door of a hospital that he spent 2 hours waiting in pure distraught.
He knocks once, about to pounce his knuckles one more time, before he hears a voice.
The voice.
Him.
“Come in.”
Ilya opens the door in dread. In fear of seeing Shane in a state that is going to crush his soul into bits of mercury. The shame of carrying the guilt of the event and the aftermath doesn’t make sense to him. He wasn’t the one to do it. He would never do anything to put Shane under such circumstances. But yet again, whatever they are doing is equally destroying, but that’s something neither is ready to admit. And yet, there is a ball in his throat, stuck. Not moving, neither up nor down. It is too heavy. It is too large.
A part of him thinks that he could have prevented it. Somehow. Some way. He could have done something about this. He could have distracted Cliff. Or paid more attention to him. Calculating his moves, his intentions. Whether the hit was a strategy or a mistake. Ilya settled for the former.
He could have stopped this from happening. He could ha-
“Hey,” he hears that voice again. So familiar and yet alien. He would recognize it from miles away. In a crowd of people, music too loud to even hear yourself, but he would recognize him. He always speaks with an armour hugging his words. In public, on TV, during and after games, with Hayden, with his parents. But that armour gets let down when Ilya is in the frame. Not fully, not completely. Part of him holds himself to the inevitable that threatens to happen any time lately.
And now. Now that armour is gone. It is just him. It is just Shane. And Ilya wants to find a hole and bury his head in there. For a minute. Or five. Long enough to cool it down. Enough to return that vulnerability back. That’s the least he could do.
“Come here, please?” He speaks again, and who is Ilya to deny Shane Hollander?
He walks towards him, eyes glued to the ground, unable to look at him. One look at his eyes and Ilya will break. Not that he was ever whole.
He takes a seat on a chair next to him, eyes never daring to look up. He senses a hand crawling towards his, fingers intertwining with his own, a palm hugging his. And it is all so tender. For a second, it makes Ilya feel like he is the brittle one. That he just got shoved to the walls with all force, not Shane. He might as well have. A piece of him was taken away alongside Shane on that spinal board.
So tender. It hurts.
“Look at me, please.” That voice again. So, so gentle. A dagger to his heart. He can’t. The knife is too deep. Blood is flowing out of him rapidly. He can’t stop it. “Ilya.” and it stops. The dagger is no longer being carved further inside him. But it is there. It will remain there for a while.
“Please,” a plea. Once again, Ilya is only a man, and there is only so much he can resist. With dread and shame, he brings his eyes to the only thing that matters. It is looking at him like he knows all the waters of the world. How the stars are hung and how galaxies dance around each other. Ilya wished he could see himself through that lens, too. A universe in which he has enough courage to tell the man he would learn the secrets of Antarctica for, that he loves him.
The question of whether Shane would even be in that universe with him wasn’t even there. No matter the reality, alternate or current, Ilya would always find him. That soul of his is too entangled with the man whose thumb is kissing his knuckles.
“Hey,” Shane speaks with the softest smile on his face, and it is beyond Ilya’s comprehension as to how someone can find so much serenity even in dirty waters. Waters like the game they play. Waters like the sports community. Waters like Cliff. Waters like him.
Shane is like a lotus flower that manages to blossom even in the dirtiest of ponds. And Ilya will always be there to watch him. Even from the sidelines.
He doesn’t realize there are tears running down his face until he feels the soft pad of a thumb brushing through his under eyes, his cheek. “No, please don’t.”
He feels lips being brushed across their conjoined hands. A kiss on each knuckle. A lingering promise of something that Ilya is yet to decipher. “It’s not worth it,” he murmurs around his fingers. “Nothing worth crying over.”
“Shane.” Ilya finally speaks, and it feels like he is going to choke on the next word that will leave his lips. His mouth is too dry to even muster a full sentence. But Shane is nothing but patient with him. Always has been. “I thought…” he pauses, and Shane keeps his eyes on him, lips still ghosting around his knuckles, “I thought something bad happened.”
“Oh…” he slowly brings down their hands to his lap, his other hand now cupping his jaw. Ilya assumes he has stopped crying, though he isn’t sure since he didn’t even feel the tears rolling down in the first place.
“I have been waiting for 2 hours now since I arrived here. 4 since they took you away. No one was telling me anything since I wasn’t family, and no news channels were reporting on anything besides what I saw at the game, and I just didn’t know what to think. I assumed the worst because if you were fine, you wouldn’t even be here right now, and I just…god…Shane, you scared me so much,” he bursts all of this in one breath. It’s almost like he gained a new lung the second he felt Shane’s lips on his skin.
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t…I didn’t think it would scare you this much.” Shane says this in a bare whisper. Every word spoken after the other would trail off into an abyss of unspoken words. But Ilya listens. He always does.
“I’m sorry for making you think that way. Like I don’t care for you. I do, Shane. So much. So much that sometimes it scares me to the bones because I don’t know what to do with it. How to handle it. The only thing I’ve ever known was your body on mine. And a little possibility of never having that or something more than that ever again put me in such a horrible place, I…I feel so guilty. All of this is my fault, and I-”
“Hey, hey, no, no, none of that. None of this,” Shane emphasizes by pointing down his body, fragile and sacred, “is your fault. Okay? You did nothing wrong, Ilya. Please stop saying that.”
“But I could have stopped it. I could have done-”
“Ilya.”
“I could have been there instead of you. It should have been me inst-”
“Ilya.”
“I should have been paying more attention to Cl-”
“Ilya, please.” Shane raises his voice, and it catches Ilya off guard, “I need you to listen to me very carefully to what I’m about to say, okay?” Ilya nods at that.
“You aren’t responsible for whatever happened at the game. No one is. Not Cliff, not me, not the referee, and especially not you. This is the nature of the game. Injuries like this and much worse are bound to happen. We don’t get to pick and choose our bad or good days, unfortunately. Maybe it was a bad day for Cliff to come and want to push me like that, or maybe it was a bad day for me that I couldn’t avoid it. The ice got the best of us. So, please stop blaming yourself for something so unpredictable.” For the first time, Shane’s words match what his eyes are trying to convey too. He just laid his heart out bare in front of Ilya, and all he can think about is how much he wishes he could kiss him right now. Kiss him with softness, kiss him with care.
“Cliff did it on purpose. I know.”
“Ilya…” A warning.
“Sorry.”
Silence erupts once again. Ilya’s eyes drifted from Shane’s once again. This time it isn’t out of shame, but out of lack of words to say. Or rather, there is so much he wants to say, but now isn’t the right time. When is that right time even going to come he isn’t sure either. Does it even exist? In the magnitude of time, the concept of a right time is too vast and broad to be narrowed down to a specific day, a specific time, or a specific feeling. The truth is, it is up to him to define when it is meant to be right. And he isn’t sure if he will ever narrow it down to that point any time soon. Or ever.
“What are you thinking about?” His spiraling gets interrupted by the voice again.
“Sorry.” He trails off. Apologizes because that is all he can say or think of.
“I’m glad that you came.”
Ilya doesn’t know what to say to that.
“I didn’t think you would,” Shane says it with apprehension. His voice much quieter now.
The dagger inside him twists further.
“I’m sorry for making you think like that…” He trails off, carefully bringing his eyes back to him again, “I’m sorry for making you feel like I don’t care about you.” A brief moment of courage electrifies through him, bringing their joint hands and simply planting his mouth to the very center where Shane’s knuckles meet his. Lips hugging the bumpiness of their bones, memorizing the shape of them. “I don’t want to do that anymore.”
“Not do what?”
“Like I don’t feel what I feel.”
“And what is it that…you feel?” Shane asks it with such cautiousness that it’s almost like he doesn’t want to push, but he also needs to know what it is that Ilya means.
“You know what exactly, Hollander. Better than you and me both.” Ilya says it with disappointment lightly shining through his words. They hold the weight of defeat.
“I want you to say it. I want to hear it from you. Your lips.”
The dagger is close to pushing through the heart.
“Not now.”
Now it’s Shane’s turn to stay silent. Now it is his turn to move his eyes away from Ilya, so he can’t read him through.
“Can you look at me, please?” It is his turn to plead now.
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“If I do, I’ll say something that I’m not meant to say. Something that has to give me validation in return and I don’t think either of us are in the right headspace to be dealing with that right now.”
The dagger has sliced through.
This is the thing they do. The constant push and pull of something that is there and absent at the same time. Something they cannot name, but hangs on the tip of their tongues. Whispered only each time they kiss, but never acknowledge. Brushed over because the lives they live are too loud and vast to sneak in another weight of something so unbearable.
And so they settle to the secrecy of it all. Not just their meetings being in between shadows, away from the public vicinity. The secret of being more than just two people who enjoy each other’s physical presence. The secret that they both know because the body is the biggest giveaway of lying. And yet, if the words aren’t spoken out loud, nothing is real.
Words, they hold power. They manifest. And the mere thought of uttering them out loud is going to change the game. The game that neither knows how to play.
Or maybe they do. But the thought of skating on more than one ice rink is terrifying to the core.
Ilya feels the familiar warmth caressing his cheek once again, a soft pad of a thumb tracing down the outline of his lips. “Will you come to the cottage?” He sounds so fragile, Ilya wishes for the dagger to be pulled out and let all the blood pool the floors of this room.
“I don-”
“Please.” The voice sounds so raw, so honest. Like he is on the verge of tears.
“I’ll try,” is what he settles for.
The truth is, the answer is yes. It has been a yes ever since Tampa. But the ghost of Post-Soviet discipline is too engraved in his veins to agree on something that sounds too good to be true. He almost never heard a ‘yes’ or a ‘sure’ when growing up. A way of raising a humble kid. Unspoiled. Stern. But also hopeless, dreamless, never daring to reach the stars. The fear of enjoying the possibility of something that hasn’t happened yet felt almost like a sin. That if his parents had said ‘yes’ instead of ‘maybe’ or ‘we will see’, the earth would shatter the very next second.
And now, Ilya is careful enough to keep the earth spinning until all he sees is the cottage and Shane. And maybe then, maybe only after, he will learn to enjoy the perks of saying ‘yes’ from the start. But for now, he has to keep the earth whole.
“Okay.” Is what Shane settles for, though he can see his eyes saying, “Why don’t you just say ‘yes’?”
Somewhere in the roams of the hospital corridor, he hears the cries of a mother asking to see her son. Ilya takes that as his cue to resign himself from their little bubble of solitude. He plants one last kiss on his knuckles, getting enough courage once again to lean in and kiss his forehead too. Let his lips linger for a little longer. Memorize the feeling, the taste, the warmth of Shane’s skin on his lips. Making sure that it lasts him long enough until the next time they see each other again.
“Bye,” Shane speaks, a tender smile on his lips. Ilya wishes he could kiss him. Not finding it in himself to be strong enough to lean lower. Not strong enough to pull away if he lets his guard down now.
So a “Bye” in return is all he settles for and turns away to leave the room before his parents notice him.
The minute he closes the door behind him, he takes out his phone and starts frantically looking for ‘Jane’ in his contacts. He scrolls down until he sees the ‘Make this contact your emergency number’ and presses it.
The dagger has managed to mold itself between the torn tissues of his soul. Becoming a part of him. A reminder that he will be carrying within him forevermore. A reminder that can be brutally taken out of him any second. But for now, he will learn to live with it.
With pain comes courage. And if that courage will always lead him to Shane, then he is willing to live with his heart embedded between a blade for as long as Shane will let him.