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The credits for Interstellar were still rolling when Ilya reached for his phone and saw the time, and and in the aftermath of time and space and gravity and love he was left with only this:
He was an idiot. The last metro had pulled out of Square-Victoria seven minutes ago without him on it.
How had he lost track of time so badly?
“Blyat.”
Shane lifted his head from where it had been nestled against Ilya’s ribs, blinking in the blue wash of the TV. “Hm? What’s wrong?”
“The train, Hollander.” Ilya groaned, pinching at his brow. He held up the phone and let the numbers speak for themselves. “You and your stupid movie and stupid soft couch and my stupid self has cost me my commute.”
Shane squinted at the screen. The hazy, post-session softness that had been draped over him for the last hour snapped into focus, and Ilya watched him do the math, and arrive at the worst possible answer. Stupid movie had been to harsh. Shane’s mouth opened to offer an apology maybe, but Ilya cut him off first.
“No. Do not start. It was my own fault.” He levered himself off the couch, scowling. What would a taxi cost at this hour? He was being paid so it wasn’t the end of the world, all things considered… “I only say it is stupid because I am stupid and rather than paying attention to the time I got… sucked… in. Like at the end with TARS and Cooper and Gargantua.”
“Hm. Well… if you’ve missed your train…”
And there was that face again, Shane thinking and coming to another worst possible answer.
“I could call you a car if you’d like? It’s no problem. Or…” Shane paused, chewing on his lower lip. “Or… you could stay? It’s fine. I have a guest room, after all. Do you want to just stay the night and leave in the morning?”
Ilya looked at him. He looked at the blanket puddled around Shane’s hips, at the mottled bruise his own mouth had put on Shane’s collarbone hours ago, and stopped at Shane’s fingers worrying a loose thread on the cashmere.
A guest room.
Do you want to stay the night?
What stray did not want to be invited in, given a bed, to be petted and fed and warm? He would never, ever, want to go home.
Etot durak.
Obviously, the correct choice was the car even though it would cost more. A taxi from here to his apartment wouldn’t be too bad on a night like this when the bar crowds were spilling out into the streets, so the math of the car was not the problem. And would he even be paying when BoyScoutShaneHollander was looking at him so earnestly? No, the fool of a gentleman would no doubt insist on paying himself.
“You shouldn’t be so nice to the help, Hollander. It gives the wrong idea.”
Shane sat up, and the blanket slid off his shoulder. He was frowning. “It’s almost midnight, Rozanov. Even if I call you a car now, it’ll take time to get here and then you still won’t be back until later, and then you’ve got to shower and unwind and do all your… whatever it is you do, um, after. I mean I’ll do what you want, if you want the car I’ll call you one, but… wouldn’t it be easier just to stay and go in the morning?”
“Hollander…”
“I can even have breakfast for you delivered, if you want. That way you won’t leave on an empty stomach or have to eat my ‘sad boy kibble.’ And the guestroom has this amazing ensuite rainfall shower and these heated towel racks that no one’s ever even used so you’d be doing me a favor, really. Trying it out, so.” Shane lifted one shoulder and let it drop. “Use all the hot water you want. Sleep in. I’ll be up and awake and I can go to the gym so you won’t even have to see me if that’s what’s weird about it.”
That was not what was weird about it.
And Ilya was better than this, more disciplined than this, and he knew what he had to say.
No.
Instead, Ilya dragged a hand down his face. “You are a menace, Hollander.”
“Is that a yes?” Shane asked, and those dark brown eyes were so hopeful it should’ve been illegal.
“It is a fine because I am too tired to think clearly, and if you want me to be here and waste your water and your money because you are a foolish rich man with enough to waste, then fine. It is not a yes.”
“I’ll take it.”
Grinning, Shane perked up and stood, gathering the empty water glasses off the coffee table and moving around with all the same giddy energy of a pup about to receive a treat. Was this all it took it make him happy? It was pathetic. It was sweet, and Ilya had to swallow around the taste of it, that him just being here, even if he was going to sleep in another room, was enough to make this foolish man wag his tail. Shane padded off toward the kitchen with the cashmere trailing behind him on the hardwood like a coronation robe that had lost its way, and Ilya pushed himself off the couch and his knee complained but it was quieter than the buzzing excitement that was starting to take root in the other parts of his body.
So… he was staying.
He collected his duffel from by the front door and limped back to find Shane waiting for him in the hallway with a stack of folded clothes balanced on one forearm.
“These are mine so… they might fit if you want something clean to sleep in. We’re about the same size, give or take.” Shane looked down at the stack and then back up, and the tips of his ears were pink. “I put a couple of waters by the bed. And there’s an extra toothbrush in the drawer under the sink. Still in the wrapper.”
“You keep spare toothbrushes, Hollander?”
“My mom taught me to.”
Of course. Of course.
“Thank you.” Ilya took the stack of clothes from Shane’s forearm and did not let his fingers brush Shane’s wrist on the handoff, because… that… might just end him outright.
“Mm. And use whatever you want in the bathroom. I’ll tidy the room up while you’re in there.”
What was there to tidy?
They walked into the guestroom together, Ilya feeling awkward, and this extra space was nearly the size of his apartment’s living room and kitchen combined with a bed made up in white linen so crisp it looked as though a hotel maid had been through an hour ago. The truth was more likely that no one had ever slept in it at all.
“I… Ah. Thank you, again, Hollander.”
“You’re welcome. And good night, Rozanov.”
“Goodnight, Hollander.” He said, and slunk away to hide in the bathroom, which was unsurprisingly obscene. A walk-in shower the size of a small cathedral, done in black slate, with that aforementioned rainfall head mounted in the ceiling and a second handheld wand on a sliding bar. A towel rack glowed faintly along its chrome bars, perpetually toasty. He stripped out of his clothes and stepped within and stood under the rainfall head and turned the water as hot as it would go.
It went very hot.
It was orgasmic, glorious, wasteful in the extreme. Ilya bit back a groan and braced both palms against the slate and let the water pound the back of his neck and the knot of his right trapezius where he always carried the day’s work, and then he let it pound the small of his back, and then he turned around and let it hit the front of his bad knee, and the heat went through the joint and met the ache in the middle and dulled it down to something he could pretend was not there at all.
Bars of expensive soaps sat on little built in shelves and they smelled like vanilla and botanicals. They were lush and lathery and… wait… that wasn’t soap at all. An exfoliation bar? And was that a sugar scrub?
Everything was sampled.
He shampooed his hair with whatever was in the expensive looking bottle marked shampoo and conditioned it with whatever was in the twin expensive bottle marked conditioner, and both of them smelled like a forest rich people imagined when they imagined forests, a place filled with unicorns and magic and whatever petrichor was.
And… as long as he stood there in the steam and the rain with the suds he could almost picture that fantasy rich-person dream, too.
When he got out, the towels were warm against his skin and it was just as lovely as he would’ve hoped. He dried off slowly, and his knee, temporarily bribed by the heat, held its peace, and turned to the borrowed clothes which were, unsurprisingly, a Voyagers training-camp t-shirt in soft grey cotton and a pair of navy sweatpants with a drawstring. He pulled them on gratefully for something fresh and soft, and the hem rode up an inch above where Ilya’s own shirts sat, and the sweatpants were half an inch too short in the leg and bagged slightly at the waist but it was close enough… and…
… they were his, and feeling weak and indulgent after the shower, Ilya curled his fingers in the fabric of the shirt and brought it to his nose to smell them, even though they were clean, because it was Shane’s.
After, Ilya looked at himself in the fogged mirror—a man in another man’s pajamas, his hair wet and curling at the temples, his mother’s gold cross against his sternum beneath the stretched cotton—and huffed out a short laugh at his own reflection.
Pozor, he said to the man in the mirror. You are a disgrace. Look at you.
The man in the mirror, who had gotten him into this, said nothing.
What am I doing here?
He limped back into the guest room.
Just as Shane said he would, he had ‘fixed up’ the room while Ilya showered. There were now two bottles of water sitting on the nightstand: one room-temperature, one still beaded with cold from the fridge, because Shane, who did nothing by halves, had apparently been unable to decide which Ilya would prefer and had hedged. Next to the waters sat a small bowl of almonds and a single banana, positioned with care.
Ilya stared at the banana for a long moment.
Boy Scout, he thought. Golden idiot. Who taught you this.
He knew who. He had met her in photographs on the wall last time, a small fierce woman with Shane’s dark eyes, and the woman in those photographs had clearly raised her son to receive guests as though the guest were the emperor of a small grateful country. And the son had grown up and moved into a glass tower and had nobody to receive, and had kept the rituals anyway, and tonight the rituals were being spent on Ilya Rozanov, who was in no universe an emperor, and who had not been given a banana at bedtime since he was a child and his mother was still alive.
Ne seychas, he told himself. Not now. Sleep first. Feelings never.
He drank half of the cold water bottle in one pull and set it back on the nightstand next to its room-temperature twin. He pulled the duvet back—it was heavy, and stuffed with down, likely real down, and made the small rustling sound that only very expensive bedding made—and got in.
Bohze moy.
What was he doing fucking in these beds when they felt like this?
Ilya sank. He sank further than he had sunk into any mattress since he had left Moscow, and his lower back, which had been holding a grudge since his early twenties, released it on the spot and went limp along with the rest of him. The pillow was the right height. The pillow was the right height. Ilya had not known, until this moment, that pillows came in heights, and that his was the wrong one, and that this one, belonging to no one, kept for guests who did not exist, was correct.
He lay on his back and stared at the ceiling, then rolled on to his side to stare out the windows over looking the city. Below, he could see the orange smear of the city’s light bounced off the fog and one pale star punching through.
And… then there was math. He closed his eyes, and there was math.
How far was it to Shane’s room? The master suite?
From this door to there it was perhaps fifteen feet. The hallway was fifteen feet long. Fifteen feet from this door to the door of the master bedroom. Call it three strides on a good knee. Four on this one.
And then the master-bedroom door, which Shane had likely closed but which Ilya was willing to bet had not been locked.
And then the master bedroom itself, with the bed on the far wall under the window. And Shane… laying there. Alone.
Shane would, he thought, also not tell him to leave if he made the short journey down the hall.
Ilya closed his eyes.
He did not walk the fifteen feet.
Not tonight.
But he fell asleep counting the strides.
Odin… Dva... Tri…