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There is a special kind of humiliation that comes from having your favorite pair of sweatpants stolen from you while your cum is not yet dried on your stomach that Ilya has never experienced before and he has experienced a lot of humiliation. Standard humiliations, like losing a game or telling Sveta this goal's for you and then promptly missing, yes. But also special humiliations like losing the Olympics to Latvia and having Shane Hollander run out on him immediately post orgasm while still wearing Ilya's favorite pants. According to his father, Ilya loves inventing new kinds of humiliations so really this is just par for the course for him it shouldn't be surprising.
If Ilya were a stronger man he would go out and find a man hotter than Shane and get laid. Unfortunately, there are very few people that hot and he is stuck in Boston with a bunch of hockey players who regularly get their faces bashed in.
He might have to settle for Marly. Maybe he can convince Sveta to have a threesome. Surely two hot people at the same time equal one Shane Hollander. If only he has taken pictures the last time he and Marly had hooked up. He's sure the image of a naked Marly and the finest bottle of whatever Sveta is into drinking this week would be enough to convince her
And then the news drops that Shane Hollander is dating Rose Landry drops and all thoughts of being the filling of a Sveta-Marly sandwich fly out the window because his dick immediately shrivels up in jealously. Of course Shane traded up to Rose Landry. She's more hotter than Ilya (a hard feat to accomplish) and more socially acceptable than Ilya (a very easy feat to accomplish). Ilya stares at the pictures of him carrying her shopping bags and smiling and imagines the two of them having absolutely mind-blowing sex (because all sex with Shane is mind-blowing) and just knows that he has to get off this horrible, cursed continent as fast as he can.
One lie about a family emergency later, a massive amount of money, and several weeks later, Ilya stands at base camp looking up at a mountain so big that he wants to cry. His feet hurt from his new shoes and there is no Dunkin for miles, but he has finally escaped all thoughts of Shane. Who he is definitely not thinking of as he gazes up at Everest.
The mountain is breathtaking (much like the freckles of someone who Ilya definitely isn't thinking about) and he is going to climb it. Normally, you can't just decide to climb Everest, but Ilya sold enough of his cars to acquire just enough to weasel his way into a spot on a Mountain Consultants expedition after someone else had dropped out. He has to tell everyone his name is Jake Berenson, but the head of the tour group, Anders Crowell (Ilya wonders if he has any relation to the head of the MLH), has assured him that it's just because it would take too long to fix the paperwork and it would be a shame for Ilya to miss the climbing season this year. People do it all the time, he was assured on the phone. Just send the check for the cost of the expedition and it would all be good.
And now Ilya was here, and he was going to climb Mount Everest.
When Ilya thought of climbing mountains before coming to Everest—well, he never thought about climbing mountains before, actually—he had figured it was something simple like showing up in your little hiking outfit, dragging yourself up some rocks, and then going down again. Maybe you sleep on the mountain if it is very big. Climbing Everest however, is the work of multiple weeks.
Ilya arrives and then lazes about base camp doing something called "acclimatizing", which is a fancy word for getting used to how high up he is. After he and the rest of his group are done acclimatizing at base camp, they then climb up to Camp One, where they wait to get used to how high up they are again. They do this at three more camps, the air getting thinner as they move up higher, until one day Anders claps his hands and tells them it's summit day.
Ilya can't really feel excited by this because he feels like he's dying, but he doesn't think that has anything to do with how high up he is. He's a professional athlete, but other than the scary ladder crossing at the Khumbu Icefall, he's been surprised by how easy it's been. It's one foot in front of the other, push through the pain, keep going until you reach a tent you can collapse in. In that way, it really isn't any different from anything else he's done in life.
It's not even the first time he's felt like he was dying. He remembers the first time he combined too much alcohol with the wrong drugs, particularly grueling practices on days when he couldn't afford to give in to the injuries screaming in his body, the first time said the carefully coached phrased she died in an accident to someone. He's maybe been dying this whole time and perhaps only just now really starting to feel it.
When he stands on top of the world, looking down at the blankness of snow, Ilya just wants to lie down. He's tired in a way he didn't think was possible before and he still has to climb back down the mountain. Some of the people around him cheer, take pictures, tie flags to flap in the wind, but Ilya just wants to lie down and never get up again. Sveta would be disappointed in him. His brother would be thrilled to have unfettered access to his money. His father probably doesn't even remember that he isn't in Russia anymore. He should be angry about it, probably. That here he is standing higher than most people will ever get and all he feels is a sort of heavy tiredness that doesn't have anything to do with the fact that the air is so thin his brain is actively dying.
He turns around and starts the climb down.
A storm rolls in and erased the path to Camp Four before Ilya gets there. He wanders in the blizzard, blind and not really caring if he accidentally stumbled to his death. Maybe he can be a landmark like Sleeping Beauty or Green Boots. Here lies Russia's Greatest Love Machine. He died cold and alone and nobody cared enough to bring his body down.
He finds camp by walking directly into a tent, except he's so cold and confused that he thinks the wind has thrown a blanket into his face at first. He paws and stumbles until he reaches the tent's entrance and still doesn't quite understand what's going on until someone, maybe from another expedition because he doesn't know him, drags him inside and pours hot tea down his throat. They huddle together in the tent, trying to share body heat, and trade life stories. Ilya promises to sign something for the man, who's name he learns is Sam Randi, if he survived with enough fingers left over to hold a pen. Sam doesn't watch hockey because he's from Texas, but he promises to send Ilya a care package of gas station nuggets and grocery store tortillas when they get home. Sam won't shut up about his husband back home, and somewhere between Sam recounting how he met Doug and how they said goodbye at the airport, Ilya realizes that he needs to see Shane the same way he needs to keep warm. Mandatory. Vital to his continued survival. He's going to have to make it through tonight somehow because he needs to touch Shane, hear his voice, feel the shape of his body again.
It's the memory of Shane on the other side of the face off, the feeling of his mouth on Ilya's body, the shift of his eyes when he's telling a joke, that gets Ilya through the storm. Warmth is a boy with freckles telling him not to smoke and Ilya can't let himself die without seeing him again.
It turns out that you can't disappear to hide on a mountain for several weeks without people who care for you noticing. Which makes sense in hindsight but there had been a part of Ilya, ugly and large, that had thought he would be able to slip off unnoticed.
When he calls Sveta from a hospital across the world from her, she already knows where he is and is already on her way. Apparently his true identity as Not Jake Berenson had been revealed almost immediately once the expedition company realized they might be responsible for the death of one of the biggest MLH stars when the blizzard hit. There had apparently been some very shady things going on with it, and some of the other survivors are talking about a lawsuit of some kind. Ilya doesn't really need the money and he's a bit busy trying to salvage his contract while shuffling a crying Sveta and a crying Marly and a crying Connors and a crying St. Simon and even a crying LeClaire, which is the biggest mind fuck of the whole situation.
It's while he's lying in the hospital that he realizes that he maybe went to Everest to die. Worse, he realizes that he definitely doesn't want to die anymore. He doesn't know what to do with that.
Wanting to die for him has always looked like his mother, too still because of too many pills. It has never looked like a mountain, large and looking and cold. If he thinks about it, it might also look like too much alcohol and driving too fast in fancy cars. It's frightening to realize, but he always was his mother's son so why would this be any different?
The realization feels monumental, but it's quiet. It's just Ilya lying awake in a hospital bed in the middle of the night, realizing that when he went he wouldn't have cared if he didn't come back but now that he's back he can't imagine ever wanting to repeat the climb.
He opens his chat with Jane and stares at the messages there. While he's looking at it, the tell tale dots that indicate someone is typing pop up.
A message never arrives.
Ilya manages to somehow stay employed, but Boston trades him to the Ottawa Centaurs for a frankly obscenely low price. In between packing up his Boston place and finding a new one in Ottawa and moving countries, he keeps opening the message thread with Jane. It remains unchanged. No messages received, but no messages sent either.
Three days after moving to Canada, Ilya drives to Montreal. He parks outside the building where he and Shane used to have sex and parks before he realizes there isn't any point in being there. It's just a building bought for sex. No one lives there.
He drives back to Ottawa.
The season is over. He won't play his first game as a Centaur until the fall. He has nothing to do until then.
Ilya adopts a dog and starts therapy. After he starts therapy he finds out he did that in the wrong order, but it's really not his fault that he found a dog wandering around with no one to love her before he was able to find a therapist that spoke Russian. He has no control over the order that events in his life happen.
He's walking his dog after a therapy session when he remembers that he's out of Coke so he steals into a small shop and walks directly into Shane.
Shane looks like he's just seen a ghost, which is fair since Ilya did almost die on a mountain. They trade small talk and then go back to Ilya's house with the intention of having sex.
They don't even make it to the bedroom, ending up on the couch and then falling off the couch as they try to get rid of their clothes without letting go of each other. Ilya is on his way to getting Shane's dick in his mouth when a whine from their side stops them.
"Can you put your dog up?" Shane asks, staring at her line she's going to sell pictures of them to the tabloids.
"Her name is Anya."
"Well can you put Anya up?"
Except Ilya can't because he isn't a barbarian who puts his dog in a cage and Shane doesn't want to have sex with her very attentive gaze on them so they get dressed again and do something completely crazy.
They talk.
Shane tells Ilya that he and Rose broke up. That he's gay. That he just came out to his parents and friends.
Ilya tells Shane about the terror of shivering in a tent during a blizzard. About wanting to die and then wanting to live. About what he wanted all those months ago in Boston.
Anya falls asleep on the rug and they sneak quietly to the bedroom where, behind a closed door, they fuck until they both forget how to talk. They shower and Ilya lets Anya into the room and Shane is horrified that Ilya lets her sleep in the bed.
In the morning Shane invites Ilya to see his cottage. Ilya calls Sveta and she immediately monopolizes the Shane to talk hockey. It's the start of something special and new.
He never gets his sweatpants back, but that's fine because he steals Shane's favorite hoodie in retaliation.
And they never eat tuna melts ever again.