Chapter Text
“This is my actual fucking nightmare, Ilya.” / “Then maybe it is time to wake up, yes?”
What Shane did not expect, when he took his first ill-advised step into the real estate business, was just how many phone calls the process would require. His tightly monitored free time seemed to have dwindled into an endless monotony of structural inconsistencies, and wood grain, and the cost of renting yet another crane to do whatever the fuck needed done on the roof.
Complicating the situation was, of course, the fact that Shane didn’t really give a shit what sort of wood grain or primer the place had, or whether the front door opened inward or outward. He cared about enough to know that the foundation should be strong enough to withstand high winds and inclement weather. And he assumed, privately, that meant it would also withstand other things. Like shaking bedframes, or something being tossed forcefully into its walls. Something like Shane himself, for example.
"Uh, okay." Shane tapped a finger absently against the side of his phone. "The thing is, I haven't actually been there in months. I don’t know any more than you do."
On the other end of the line, a voice crackled in a burst of static. "Look, man. They were here yesterday and now they're not.”
“You think someone stole them?”
“A pile of support beams? They’d need to be pretty fucking strong for that, eh?” Someone else was speaking in the background, too far away for Shane to make out specifics. “Besides, it’s not that kind of neighbourhood.”
That was true enough. Shane had debated for probably too long before deciding on the building. A nicer area was by definition higher profile, but he had come to learn that it also granted a necessary degree of anonymity. There were plenty of places where the very sight of two NHL players in the wild would turn heads, no matter what they were or weren’t doing with each other. But the vibe was different when everyone around was equally consumed with privacy, or already distracted by their own importance. The surrounding buildings were home to actors and CEOs and athletes of other sports that Shane cared less about than his own. Those people didn’t bat an eye when they passed him on the street.
They also had no reason to steal a large amount of supports from a construction site overnight.
“Right, yeah,” Shane said. He spent a moment fumbling in his backpack for his wallet; zipped the pocket closed again. “I guess we can just order new ones.”
“That’s -” The man started, but cut himself off with a frustrated huff. “Sure, man, we can do that. But what about these? They didn’t just disappear. That’s, you know, a lot of raw materials.”
By now they’d reached the end of the back tunnels of Montreal airport, and Shane caught the questioning look Hayden shot in his direction when he stalled, just inside the door outside. He could feel the chill from here, a sharp, sobering spike of winter air each time one of his teammates pushed past. It was familiar in the strange, nostalgic way of any Canadian winter.
“Yeah,” Shane muttered. “I know.”
“Shane.” Hayden was at his elbow.
“Look, I’m in Montreal for the next few days. I’ll come by and have a look. Uh, soon. Okay?”
There wasn’t much Shane could do about the situation that a whole team of professionals couldn’t, but the offer seemed to placate the man on the phone enough that he favoured Shane with a little affirmative mhm.
And while they were already talking about his trip out to the building…
“You guys aren’t working tomorrow are you?” Shane did his best to pitch the question casual. It was a normal thing to ask someone he was employing to work on a building that he owned. There were absolutely no illicit undertones to the thing. This was as normal and heterosexual as a conversation could get. Shane was crushing it.
The answer, however, caught him off-guard again.
“Buddy, I don’t think anyone’s working tomorrow.”
“What?”
Hayden nudged his arm, and Shane nodded back, distracted.
“You know.” The man was still talking. “The storm?”
“Shane, come on.” Hayden sounded properly annoyed now, and when Shane looked up he realized they were the only two left in the little foyer, loitering awkwardly in front of the door.
“I have to go,” Shane said into the phone. “But look, just order the replacements and we’ll deal with this later.”
“Sure.” The guy’s voice was tired, Shane realized. He understood the feeling. “Bye then.”
The line went dead.
“Sorry, sorry,” Shane said. “Let’s go.”
***
It was fucking cold outside, but then it was always fucking cold in Montreal. The wind was loud too, pushing through the roof of the private underpass with enough force that it literally whistled. It was too loud to talk over, so they didn’t try as they made their way to the car idling nearby.
They were the only ones getting picked up, the area empty of other travellers important enough to be collected away from public scrutiny.
The whole thing had made Shane uncomfortable, at first, like everything that came along with the fanfare of notoriety, but after a while he couldn’t help but feel a little comforted by the protection. It was another barrier between his flimsily kept privacy and the rest of the world, and Shane wasn’t in any sort of position to turn that down. He hadn't been for years.
“You hear about the storm?” The driver asked, once they’d pulled away from the terminal.
It didn’t take long to get from the airport to Bell Centre, twenty minutes on a good day, and more like forty in traffic. Or in this kind of snow. He watched as bits of the familiar skyline started to flash along the gray haze of the horizon, off-white and eerily still in the falling snow.
“Yeah,” Shane said. “Bad one, huh?”
“You think the game will go ahead?” The driver clearly had ulterior motives, if the Metros sticker on the dashboard was anything to go by, but Shane shrugged along with him.
“It’s a possibility,” he said, after a moment. “If people are talking enough to be worried about it. But there’s a bad storm here every other week.”
“Tu l’as dit!” The driver sounded proud, like Shane had just appealed to his ingrained sense of national merit. Which was fair enough, they were Canadian after all. “They might think they know snow down in Boston, but mark my words, if the game is cancelled, it will be because they can’t hack it out here.”
“Well, if the plane can’t land, that’s not really their fault.” Shane was saved from following through on his frankly problematic instinct to stand up for the Boston team’s ability to withstand cold, by the buzzing of his phone in his coat pocket. “If that company has lost something else in the building site, I swear…”
Lilly: hear you might need something to warm you up tonight 🔥
Shane refrained from rolling his eyes with significant effort.
Jane: I’m Canadian.
Jane: I don’t feel cold.
Lilly: Russia is colder
And, just before Shane opens the car door again to face the cold:
Jane: What did you have in mind?
***
Boston’s plane did land, in the end, but it was one of the last that made it through before the rest of the flights were cancelled.
Shane got one more text from Lilly, during training, which he pointedly did not open in the locker room.
And by the time he got out, he had to admit that maybe even the Quebec natives were justified in being a little bit weary about the whole inclement winter storm thing. The snow was still coming down outside, even thicker than before, and what there was on the ground was being whipped up again by the wind, creating a little haze of vortex along the road. Shane had more than enough experience driving in the show, but the sheer volume of it all was nerve wracking, even for him.
He slid behind the wheel of his car, and reached for his phone one more time before starting the car. He had two new texts, neither of which, he was decidedly not disappointed to see, was from Lilly.
One was from his mom.
Mom: Heard about the storm! I hope the game isn’t cancelled.
And the other from a number Shane didn’t have saved, but a brief scroll of his recent calls told him that it was the same one the contractor had called him from earlier.
514-617-5310: We’re heading off now to get out before the storm tonight. Still no sign of the supports. Stay safe.
He texted back a thumbs up to the contractor, a brief description of the storm to his mom, and then opened Lilly’s message, staring in a brief, heart-pounding hesitation.
The building was empty. He had confirmation right there in his hand. The game tomorrow wasn’t until the afternoon, if it happened at all. They had plenty of time and a guaranteed level of privacy that felt a little more like freedom than Shane knew what to do with; freedom, and not an insignificant amount of arousal.
He texted back.
Jane: I’ll be at the apartment in an hour.
***
The apartment itself was fine, because Shane had made a point of getting to at least a semi-habitable state, after the first few times he and Ilya met there. A pile of construction materials was stacked neatly down the corridor from his door, and there was nothing in the way of food or most necessities for living, but it did have a semblance of a living room, that the door to the bedroom opened out to. It had a couch with what Shane’s designer clearly considered a perfectly reasonable amount of pillows.
It did not, however, have curtains, which Shane had felt only a slight hint of hesitation about when he let Ilya in.
He’d felt another hint of it when Ilya pushed him down on the couch, knocking three pillows to the floor in the process, and sucked a line of hard kisses against Shane’s neck and the underside of his jaw. He’d tugged the collar of Shane’s shirt down with his teeth, to scrape against the point of collarbone below it, and Shane had pretty much stopped thinking about the curtains after that.
He certainly wasn’t thinking much of anything now, except for -
“Fuck. Rozanov. That’s…”
From the way his lips curled slightly around the base of Shane’s cock, Ilya was more than aware of whatever “that” was. Which was good, because the rest of the sentence died somewhere in Shane’s chest in favour of a frankly embarrassing gasp.
Shane knew, logically, that Ilya was only touching him four places: his mouth on Shane’s cock, one hand on his left pec, the other gripping his right hip with bruising intensity, and the soft weight of his chest resting between Shane’s thighs. Ilya was six feet of muscular Russian athlete, sure, but he also was just one man with four limbs and a tongue. And that was strange, because Shane often felt like Ilya was touching him everywhere at once, every part of his body singing with heat and pressure and pleasure and a delicate spark of intensity that was Ilya Rozanov completely.
There was Ilya’s mouth, warm and wet and soft around him, the swipe of his tongue along Shane’s shaft and the base of his head. And there was, of course, the intoxicating buildup of pressure and heat that came along with Ilya’s mouth, and it didn’t stop there. The heat flushed down his thighs, up his stomach and into his shoulders, into the nipple Ilya kept pinching between his fingers whenever he thought Shane wasn’t paying enough attention. Asshole.
One of Shane’s hands was in Ilya’s hair, gripping the sweaty curls at the base of his neck, and the heat was in his hands too, transferred somehow from the scrape of Ilya’s tongue to the blond streaks between Shane’s fingers. It felt important and very nearly tenuous, one single point of gentle contact amidst the heightening swell of tongue and fingers and bruises on Shane’s hip and breath hitching in his throat. And -
“Oh, God, I’m gonna -”
And Shane came with a half-choked gasp, turning his head to hide his face against one of the remaining cushions.
Ilya swallowed, of course, which never failed to make Shane shudder into the already-fading spike of climax. Like everything Ilya did, it excited him in a way Shane couldn’t bring himself to examine too closely, even as he was only just coming down from an orgasm. Well, first orgasm.
Again: asshole.
Ilya’s eyes were shining when Shane looked back, with a soft sort of humour that was slowly becoming familiar; a look that suggested Shane was in on the joke too. His right hand was drawing little patterns against Shane’s hip now that it didn’t have to hold on anymore, which tickled.
“What?”
It wasn’t much in the way of a question, but Ilya’s chin jutted out a bit nonetheless, the hint of a challenge.
“What do you think, Hollander?”
“I think we’d fit a lot better in the bed than we do on this couch.” Even though it had been nice to christen it, so to speak. Shane had no issue christening every piece of furniture that came into the place, support beams or otherwise.
“Mm, you’re right.” Ilya dropped a lazy kiss to the base of Shane’s stomach before pushing himself up on one arm. “I have been working on my triceps. They are too big for your furniture now. Very embarrassing.”
Shane snorted, despite himself. He sat up too, glanced down at the discarded pillows and decided they could wait.
“Just go to the bedroom, okay?”
“You are very bossy today,” Ilya muttered, but, in a move with significantly more sportsmanship than he’d ever shown on the ice, he offered Shane a hand to pull him to his feet before turning away,
“I’m just - “ There was a loud buzzing noise from the floor; phones, Shane realized.
They both paused, then went searching for pants. Shane found his where he’d left them, in a neat pile by the far wall, and Ilya dug into the lump of material he’d left at the foot of the sofa.
Incoming call from Desjourneys. Shane walked to the bedroom before he answered, hoping the wall was thick enough to muffle Ilya’s voice behind him.
***
When Shane emerged, Ilya was back on the couch, looking absently at his phone with a bored sort of frown creasing his pale eyebrows.
He hadn’t bothered to get dressed, and the sight of him sprawled, bare thighs and bare ass against the blue textures of the cushions almost made Shane worry about curtains again. Or would have, if Ilya’s dick hadn’t been right there, just resting against his inner thigh, right on Shane’s fucking couch like it was something casual; something Shane was supposed to not stare at for a good few beats while his mouth went inexplicably, humiliatingly dry.
Ilya broke the silence first. Well, the silence between them, outside the wind was still howling against the window loudly enough to be audible.
“Game is cancelled.”
“Yeah.” Shane tucked his own phone into his pocket. He, at least, had the decency to put on pants before taking a call from his boss. “Looks like the storm isn’t going to let up tonight. There are already issues with some of the main roads.”
“Jesus.” Ilya’s head dropped to the back of the couch with a muffled thump. “I thought Canadians were used to winter. This is embarrassing for you. For your whole country.”
Shane sat down beside him, up by the arm rest where he wouldn’t accidentally rub against Ilya’s sprawled leg.
“It regularly gets down to negative thirty in Winnipeg,” he said. “Even here, the fact it’s cancelled means it’s probably going to get crazy.” A beat. “Crazier than normal.”
Ilya shrugged.
“Once in Moscow all the doors to my friend’s house froze shut. She could not leave for three days. We drive on solid sheets of ice ten months out of the year.”
“Right,” Shane pointedly did not give Ilya the satisfaction of rolling his eyes. “Did you have to walk to school uphill both ways too?”
“No,” Ilya said. “We have cars in there.”
“And you only drive on sheets of ice?”
Ilya didn’t quite smile, but the corners of his eyes narrowed into little crinkles of amusement.
“Good, you’re listening.”
“Shut up,” Shane grumbled, but he let himself lean away from the armrest a bit, until his knee bumped Ilya’s.
There was a loud gust of wind, followed by a dull thud somewhere beyond the window, as if something heavy had fallen out in the street. Both of them looked up, but by now it was nearly impossible to see anything beyond a crusted blanket of half-frozen snow. Shane could still hear the wind though, louder than before, like one shrill voice rising above the roar of a crowd to pierce straight between his eyes. It sounded, in a strange, abstract way, like the start of a headache.
He blinked a little; turned back to Ilya, who was looking at his phone again, probably checking the time.
If it really was too dangerous to play, he probably had the right idea. There weren’t many places less enticing to be snowed into than a virtually half-constructed apartment building with Shane Hollander, someone famously level-headed in an emergency.
This wasn’t an emergency, though. Obviously. But it was always good to be safe.
“You can go,” Shane said, lightly as he could. “If you need to, with the, you know - “ He motioned toward the window, indicating vaguely at the concept of Canadian winter.
Ilya was already shaking his head.
“I can’t,” he said. “They told me on the phone. All the cab companies have put out some sort of warning.”
Shit. This was looking serious.
“Inclement weather?” Shane guessed.
“Something like that. And the bridge, I think. Apparently it is frowned upon to swim under it.”
“That’s…do you think we should both try and leave? I have my car, but it might be, uh, risky?”
Because of the weather, or the possibility of being seen in public with Ilya Rozanov in his passenger seat, Shane wasn’t sure.
“Do you want to?” Ilya asked. His phone dropped to the couch on his other side with a soft thump, out of Shane’s view.
Did he? There was an obvious answer to that, one Ilya likely knew without so much as a sideways glance.
Certainly, he knew it when Shane moved his leg again, scooting over until they were pressed together knee to hip, and then Ilya’s hand was on his neck, one finger tilting Shane’s jaw so he leaned forward and met Ilya halfway, teeth scraping his bottom lip, tongue tracking the contours of his mouth.
They made it to the bed this time, and Shane appreciated the soft give of the mattress under his back when Ilya pushed him into it.
They kissed: urgent, and then lazy, and then urgent again. Ilya’s fingers caught the waist of Shane’s sweatpants and tugged them off again, and Shane didn’t even care when he tossed them unceremoniously to the floor. Ilya’s fingers trailed down his thigh, grabbing and stroking and urging Shane up to meet him as he arched his back into everything that was the sensation of Ilya on top of him.
For a while, Shane floated.
The storm was probably a serious enough thing to be worried about, or at least to merit thoughts like: When would the roads be cleared? and What would they have for dinner tonight? and What would they eat the next day, if things lasted that long? But it was hard to focus on anything so concrete - more like boring, Hollander - when Ilya was on top of him, doing the whole touching Shane everywhere and making him feel warm all the way to the tips of his fingers thing; warm in a way that had nothing to do with the electric fireplace crackling in the background.
No matter how far the temperature dropped in the world outside, Shane was warm between layers of Ilya and mattress, and Ilya’s hand was pushing his thighs apart and Shane tipped his head back so Ilya could kiss a bruise against his throat, and -
The fire went out.
To his credit, Ilya barely seemed to notice. Neither of them did, really, until Shane rolled over to reach the bedside drawer, and he was surprised by the cold more than anything. Then, he realized that he couldn’t actually see the drawer, which said a lot about his priorities, lube or otherwise.
He ignored Ilya’s frustrated huff as he spent a moment fumbling with the lamp. Nothing.
“Power’s out,” Shane said, unnecessarily.
“Okay?” Ilya’s voice was husky with something like want, his hands stroking down Shane’s side in increasing urgency. “I don’t need the light to see my own dick, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“It’s not.”
And true enough, Shane found he wasn’t worried about much at all, after he rolled back with the supplies and Ilya took over again, pushing Shane down and leaning in for a deep, hungry kiss, blacking him out in an entirely different way.
When Ilya’s first slick finger slipped into him Shane let himself moan, fully and completely. They were completely alone in the middle of a snow storm. If there was any time to let himself be loud, this was it. And God, Shane wanted to be loud sometimes when Ilya was stroking him slowly and insistently into attention, two fingers now in his ass and the other working his dick.
He wondered if Ilya did it on purpose, the way he teased one and then the other, and built up two sensations slowly into a single and glorious build of whole. It wasn’t dissimilar to how Shane felt around Ilya all the time: like they were a two man team in the world’s newest, worst sports league. Playing a game that he wanted to win more than he’d wanted anything in his life, and, at the same time, he wanted Ilya to win.
What Shane wanted, more than anything, was to roll over and let Ilya claim the cup.
So he did.