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There’s a knot in Ilya’s stomach as he watches Shane follow his mother outside. It’s fine, he knows it’s fine. Shane’s parents are lovely people, and they obviously love him a lot. Shane’s parents are not Ilya’s father. He knows that.
Knowing it doesn’t really do anything to help his heart rate.
“Are you hungry?”
Ilya jumps, and immediately feels ridiculous for doing so. He turns back around to face the table, where David has apparently been watching him watch the door for however many seconds. He feels untethered, sitting in Shane’s parents’ kitchen without Shane himself there as a buffer, and Ilya wonders if maybe he should have waited in the car after all.
“It’s lunchtime, and I’m assuming you boys haven’t eaten yet,” David continues. Ilya had almost forgotten that he’d even been asked a question. “I was just going to heat up some leftovers before you boys came over, but what do you say we whip up something a little more substantial for them?”
Ilya thinks if he tried to eat anything right now he’ll puke, but he’s not going to tell his boyfriend’s father that. So he nods and scoots his chair back as quietly as he can before following David to the attached kitchen.
While David rifles through the pantry, Ilya takes a deep breath. This is not his family. He’s here for Shane, because Shane needs him. He doesn’t—he needs to be the steady one right now. Because if Shane sees him freak out then Shane will just freak out more, and that’s not fair. Especially not when, objectively, intellectually, Ilya knows that there’s nothing to freak out about now.
But the truth is, Ilya is nervous.
Shane’s parents love him, and he loves them. They’re the most important people in his life, anyone who has had a single conversation with Shane would know that, and seeing them all together has only confirmed for Ilya how incredibly special they are to each other. Ilya is the outsider here. He’s the one meeting his boyfriend’s parents—boyfriend’s parents who do not like him—for the first time, and while he’s sure that they will go to the end of the earth to love and support their son, they have absolutely no reason to spare Ilya so much as a second glance. And he can’t help but wonder that if Shane’s parents truly didn’t like him—more than a competitive dislike of a rival player, but a genuine disapproval of Ilya as a person—would Shane still find it worth it to bother with him?
So it…it matters to Ilya that they like him. It matters a lot. And he has absolutely no idea how to make that happen.
“Here we are,” David’s voice interrupts his spiral again, and he slides a can of tomato sauce down the island in Ilya’s direction. Ilya instinctively lifts a hand to stop it before it goes flying off the other side. “Do you like spaghetti?”
“Of course,” Ilya answers automatically.
“There’s a can opener in the drawer by your hip,” David gestures with the spoon he’s pulled down from somewhere, and Ilya rushes to follow instructions. David fills a pot with water and sets it to boil, then sets up a second saucepan on the stove next to it. “Open that and just pour it all in there.”
They work in silence for a bit, then comes the awkward wait for the water to boil, and Ilya can’t think of a single thing to say that is going to get him kicked to the curb. It’s so unlike him, second-guessing his words. Even in English, Ilya likes to think he’s got a pretty good grasp on how to diffuse a serious situation with a joke. God knows he’s done it to Shane more times than either of them can count, and it only gets him in trouble about half the time. But this feels like a one-shot situation. If he says the wrong thing, even once, it’s all over. Everything they’ve spent the better part of a decade building towards, the entire future that Ilya has finally started to allow himself to picture, all gone because he doesn’t know how to fucking talk to people when it matters. He’s such a fucking mess.
“They’ll be okay,” David says. “Just give them a few minutes.”
“Of course,” Ilya replies again, like an idiot.
“None of this changes anything for us,” he adds. “About Shane, I mean. This doesn’t…I hope you don’t think we’re upset. It’s a surprise, of course, but he’s our son. Nothing could ever change that.”
“That’s good,” Ilya says softly.
“Do your parents…?”
“Both dead.” He shrugs, forces a half smile that he hopes passes as nonchalant.
“I’m sorry.”
Ilya doesn’t say that his father’s passing had been a mercy. He doesn’t say that something like this would have been the final straw in their relationship even if he was still alive. He doesn’t say anything.
“Hockey is important to us,” David begins, turning to the stove and pouring the pasta into the boiling pot. “I don’t know how much Shane has told you, but I used to play and Yuna grew up around it. She’s always been more serious about it than me, but we both love it. But Shane will always come first. So we don’t care who you play for. You’re obviously important to Shane, and as long as you’re in this house that’s all that matters.”
Ilya has to swallow around a lump rising in his throat. He’s cried so many times this week, more times than he thought he would for the rest of his life. But he can’t help it, the sheer size of his emotions threaten to drown him every time he looks at Shane, and being around his family, it seems, is similarly overwhelming. “Okay,” he whispers.
David turns around, and Ilya hates how transparent he feels in that moment. It must be a Hollander thing, he thinks, their ability to cut through the bullshit to his disgusting, molten core in a way that no one else has ever been able to. It’s foreign, and uncomfortable, but not inherently unpleasant.
“Ilya.”
Ilya blinks, turns his head away. Focuses on the barely simmering sauce on the burner closest to him. Stirs it, just for something to do with his hands.
A hand lands on his shoulder, firm but gentle. His father’s hand was never gentle. His father’s hand was never meant to comfort.
“You love him.”
It’s not a question, but Ilya nods anyway.
“Of course,” he murmurs. “Very much.”
“Then that’s all we’ve ever wanted for him. You’re good here.”
And all at once the knot in his stomach comes unraveled and Ilya takes a shuddering breath, the first time his lungs feel like they’ve filled since they got out of the car.
“Good,” he parrots. “I—thank you.”
David squeezes his shoulder once, then drops his hand. “Let’s get lunch on the table, okay?”
Their chatter is more casual as they strain the pasta and toss it with the sauce, and David directs Ilya to the fridge for the grated cheese while he pulls down enough bowls and forks for the four of them. The front door swings open, but the only sounds come from the woods outside the house, immediately muffled following the click of the door closing again. Ilya is moving the full pot (which, now that he no longer feels like his world could come crashing down at any moment, smells fucking incredible and Ilya cannot wait to dig in) from the stove to the table just as a familiar pair of arms wrap around him from behind.
It’s practically second nature at this point to turn around into the embrace, and he takes a steadying breath of Shane’s boring ocean-scented shampoo to ground himself again. He feels his boyfriend’s ribs expand, as if he’s doing the same thing pressed into Ilya’s neck. It makes his heart do something embarrassing and fluttery, to know that he provides Shane the same sense of comfort and safety that Shane provides him. It’s not a revelation, except that it sort of feels like it is, every single time. He hopes the novelty never wears off.
“Good?” he murmurs quietly, words meant only for Shane’s ears.
Shane nods against his shoulder. “Yeah,” he whispers. “Real good. You?”
Ilya glances up to find two pairs of eyes watching them, studying them, but there’s none of the judgement he remembers from his own family’s gazes. All he sees are two people who really, truly love their son, with a strength so ferocious that he can feel it just from standing in their midst. This is what a family is supposed to feel like, he thinks. He catches David’s eyes, and they share a smile.
“Real good,” Ilya agrees. “Perfect.”