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Shane watches the white smoke thin in the night air. He tries not to look too hard, like he hasn’t seen it before. He isn’t sure about the smell. It reminds him of high school, which reminds him of something that’s followed him, and that’s people thinking he’s dull. His ex Jessica’s friend called him stale once. Stale like old bread. Mostly grown out of caring, he liked to consider himself controlled.
All these years, the joke between them has been that he’s boring. Ilya isn’t the first person to call him that. Ilya’s just the first person who’s made it sound like he likes that about him. It’s stopped feeling like a jab. It’s softer now, he thinks, more affection. He might call him an asshole for it, but the things they say now land differently than before. They’re a lot lighter. Everything’s getting a lot lighter.
The musk of the fire pit overpowers the weed smell, almost. That makes him feel better, less stiff about it. They’re secluded out here at the cottage, but his hair still raises with the feeling of risk. Like the police might roll up, sirens blaring, and somehow call upon everyone else in their lives. It’s hard to think of which one’s worse.
Shane watches curiously, his eyes crinkling while Ilya blows a smoke ring into the air. He can’t help but think how cool it looks. The ring is a solid white shape, floating up, and the more it rises, the more it thins and dissipates.
His legs shift beneath him, calves warm from the fire. He cracks a hesitant smile. “Show off.” He assumes the rings are hard to do. Like most things, Ilya makes it look easy.
Ilya’s careful about where he exhales, blowing the next couple of pulls from the joint in the other direction. His free hand still hasn’t let go of Shane’s, their fingers laced against the couch cushion. His eyes borrow light from the stars, bright when he glances over. “Very good trick,” he says, pleased with himself. “Look. I will make a dog next.”
“Let’s see it, then.”
A pinch of concentration settles in Ilya’s brow as his mouth forms an ‘O’ again. Another ring drifts out, messier than the first, but still only a ring. He watches it float with a small, pleased smirk. “Good, yes?”
“Yeah. Perfect.”
Shane wants to touch the ring, then his lips, then the rest of his face. His free hand wedges in his lap, wringing the thigh of his own sweatpants. He can’t deny that this drug thing makes him nervous. There’s a younger part of him oozing back, something about wanting to impress him, about standing out, even though he asked to try it, even though Ilya would never make him do anything.
He knows he doesn’t have to anymore. He can admit to himself, too, that it isn’t the worst kind of nostalgia, slipping back into that state of mind, worrying about what Ilya thinks of him. He might never stop worrying.
Ilya leans forward toward the concrete ring around the fire pit, to the plastic cup with water inside. He flicks ash in it from the joint’s end. “Do you still want to try?”
“Um.” Shane clearly hesitates. He goes from wringing out his sweatpants to twisting his hand a bit where it’s curled inside Ilya’s. “Sure, yeah.”
He can tell that without even looking at him, Ilya doesn’t believe him. He can hear it in the gentle encouragement of his voice, the way he shakes his head. “You don’t have to.”
“I know.”
“I only brought one,” Ilya tells him lazily with a yawn. “Is not a big deal.”
Shane wants to ask why he brought it anyway, but he doesn’t. He isn’t mad. Plenty of people use it to relax. In the car on the way here, Ilya mentioned he was terrified. Maybe smoking was a way to cope.
Ilya seems to read his mind. He shrugs and looks sideways to him, a gentle handed “In case for relaxing. There are many other ways to relax.”
Would being here together not be relaxing on its own? Shane lets the thought go, choosing instead to be present with him, to reframe it as something kind and not avoidant.
“That was stupid to bring on the plane,” Shane insists with a nudge, his smile tucking. “Like, insanely stupid.”
Ilya nudges back. He raises his sarcastic brow. “First class can bring drugs. You know this.”
Shane snorts and leans back on the couch. He looks up at the bright, visible stars. He pulls their laced hands together to rest closer against his thigh.
A long, peaceful quiet fades in. It’s the most peaceful Shane’s felt in a long time.
“If you want to, I will show you how.” Ilya takes one more small, damp pull. It looks like he’s swallowing the smoke rather than letting it out as he leans back and sideways, facing Shane more directly.
Ilya’s eyes have a pink glaze in them, like they’re wet. It tugs at Shane’s chest to look at it. He isn’t sure why. Something about how they’re heavier, his eyelids lowered. It reminds him of the times he’s looked up at him from his knees. He feels his chest under his shirt rash red. Maybe drugs can be sexy.
“I think I can figure it out.” He looks down harder at where smoke winds between them in Ilya’s pinched fingers. “Is there, um, enough left?”
The question feels stupid. His brow tightens in concentration. He’s not sure how long those things last. A small part of him thinks that if they talk about it long enough, there won’t be much left for him to smoke. There’ll be less chance of him getting high and acting ridiculous.
Ilya studies him for a moment, then leans forward again toward the fire pit.
“I am not pressuring you.”
Shane follows his movements and leans in too. He reaches to pinch the rolled paper from Ilya’s fingers. “Let me see it.” When Ilya lets go, Shane palms his hand against his own knee for balance, lifting himself up. At first he tries to grip the end of the joint with his nail, where Ilya had been holding it so easily. He realizes it’s harder than he thought.
Ilya seems to notice this too and pulls it away from him. “Careful. You will burn yourself.”
“No I won’t.” He probably will. He still reaches for it again, more playfully this time. It’s really not a big deal.
“You will. Come here.” And Ilya, somehow with his thick fingers, turns what’s left of maybe half a joint and brings the mouth end to Shane’s lips. “Suck in. Not too much.”
Shane goes cross-eyed, trying to watch the ember wink near his face while also figuring out how much of his mouth he should put on it.
Ilya watches Shane try to figure out how to inhale while keeping his lips closed. He keeps his grip on the joint steady, the ember dangerously close to his finger. It goes from dangerous to skimming his skin when Shane bumps closer, sealing his mouth more firmly around the end.
Ilya watches Shane’s cheeks fill and feels the sting of the burn. He tries not to let Shane notice, only clenches his teeth behind his lips, his jaw setting tight. Their faces are too close, though, and Shane notices anyway. He pulls back with wide, apologetic eyes.
Ilya keeps watching him, then has to bite back a laugh when Shane tries to speak and can’t, a cloud of smoke bursting out instead. It blows straight into Ilya’s eyes. He jerks back sharply, tucks the joint into his own mouth, and presses both thumbs into his eyes, hissing.
Shane drops straight into a coughing fit. Ilya’s eyes are still burning when he pulls the joint from his own mouth and crouches to the patio. He grabs Shane’s water glass from the ground and presses it into his hands.
“You didn’t listen to me,” Ilya says, more worried than disappointed. “Drink.”
Shane takes the glass clumsily, still coughing hard, and gulps down what’s left of the water. The coughing turns wet and finally eases. He pants through the last swallow, rubbing at his chest as he settles.
Ilya watches carefully as Shane leans down and sets the empty water glass back on the patio. Dutifully he starts to stand. “I’ll get you more.” As he rises he takes the joint’s last hit and drops it into the plastic cup, cheeks hollowing as he straightens.
Shane stops him. Ilya pauses and looks down to find Shane’s glazed eyes lifted to him, somehow both hesitant and certain, his fist catching at Ilya’s waistband and tugging him back down.
Ilya follows the pull, smoke still filling his mouth. His throat itches as his body tries to swallow it, anything rather than blow it into Shane’s eyes like Shane had done to him.
But Shane catches him by surprise. Both his palms press to Ilya’s cheeks and pull him close. Ilya feels how his lips are still damp when Shane bruises his mouth into his.
Ilya feels Shane’s thumbs pushing at his jaw, to open him more. He understands and he opens wider. A satisfied grin cracks between them, as he slowly exhales. His chest throbs at the urgency of it, the confidence Shane takes what it is that he decides to want.
Smoke traps between their lips, from one mouth to the other. Between tasting him, he feels the shudder of Shane breathing in against his tongue. He feels the long inhale move against him coming slower, more careful than the first time. He thinks he feels the quiver in Shane’s lungs while he’s taking the smoke, holding it in until it’s gone.
With their mouths still together, Ilya pulls Shane by the hip and draws him into his lap. Their mouths don’t part as their limbs twist, bodies fitting together. Breathing in his smoke turns into Shane kissing him, his tongue pushing in, still cold-water wet. Ilya breathes sharply through his nose as Shane’s hands slide from his face down his body, tracing his collarbones, his shoulders, and back up again, until they both clutch and knot in his curls.
While they kiss, his own high drags deeply through him, making his body lazier, more malleable. Sometimes their lips don’t touch at all, only their tongues. He sighs headily into the kiss as he licks through his mouth, canting his head to take more of him, to taste him deeper.
He feels it in Shane too, how things start to be clumsy. How their sighs against each other sometimes turn to laughter, to competing with each other’s mouths. There’s a part where Ilya drags down his wet lips, digging his teeth into Shane’s chin. Licking the place he’s bitten, then nosing hard into the apple of his cheek. Snuffling like a dog in his skin while Shane’s body shudders, and he breathes a huffed laugh against him. The rubbing on his chest becomes squeezing, pinching.
The taste of the joint sits in the spit between them. Ilya drags wet to Shane’s ear, speaking against it. “Where did you learn that?” His low grin is constant on his face now, pressed against cheek. “You’ve done this before then? Someone else?”
His hands haven’t stopped moving against him. The crackling fire’s put heat on Shane’s back, and Ilya chases it up the back of his shirt. He feels the gooseflesh wash up his skin, the warmth on his own throat knowing he put it there. The warmth makes him hum, the sound pushed on the pulse of Shane’s neck.
“No.” Shane insists breathlessly through his smile. He hears himself panting, feeling Ilya’s fingers at the end of his spine. “First time.”
“You’re sure?” Ilya murmurs against him through his nibbling. “You were very good at that.”
He saw it on a TV show once, a girl sucking the smoke out of a guy’s mouth. That’s maybe embarrassing. He would say that if he remembers. He just shakes his head, delayed, and answers instead by nudging his ear closer to Ilya’s mouth, feeding him more of his earlobe that’s getting sucked on now.
There are fingernails in his ribs now, ticking up each one from under his clothes.
“Mm… I’ve never. No. I’ve never smoked.”
Shane shifts where he’s slumped against him, which presses his hips in. A throbbing gets louder in his thigh, like his heartbeat lives there. His eyes close as he melts into the touch. The wet sound of Ilya’s mouth, the low and satisfied sounds he makes while tasting him, send him into a soft stupor.
He thinks the weed makes him feel everything as more.
The summer heat has mostly cooled this late at night. The air is still sticky. Everything feels sticky. He doesn’t know how he’s supposed to feel, or when he’s supposed to feel it. It’s best case scenario that he’s on top of Ilya in the meantime. He would probably be able to feel the moment the high kicked in before Shane did.
Something starts to wash over him, slowly, like a wave in a heated pool. It’s choking at times, and it makes him swallow. He keeps swallowing. His legs are starting to get pins and needles, but he doesn’t want to move.
Somewhere they stop kissing and he curls his head into Ilya’s shoulder. His nose finds a dip in the collarbone hanging out of his shirt. He rests there, smelling there. And he’s still there now, after however long. He feels his eyes get itchy and heavy.
Time’s not a thing right now. That’s never been something for Shane. He’s always had somewhere to go. Even here, with him, he’s been ticking down the days they have left.
He pulls back somewhere, hands on Ilya’s shoulders as he drops his head back. The stars are so fucking beautiful. It’s one of the reasons he loves it out here. He mistakes the bugs by the water for the sky itself buzzing.
“Do you hear that?” The buzzing. Shane hears his own voice for the first time in a while. It doesn’t sound like him. It’s weird. He kind of wants to test it again.
“What? One of your bird friends?” Ilya teases, a bit of caution threaded through.
Shane takes a long time to answer, and he doesn’t finish. “It’s like…”
But fingers are stroking his hair. They start at the front of his forehead, all the way back to his neck. It feels, in the best way he can describe it, like a brain massage. His eyelids flutter. He sighs out a sound, which must be a good sound, because Ilya wraps a squeezing arm around him, firm but not too tight.
“Do you hear your blood moving around? Is what I heard my first time.”
It was the bugs he was hearing before, but now, with the thought inserted, as he fixates on the sky, he tries to hear exactly that. His own blood.
“What?”
If Ilya answers him, he doesn’t hear it. He just feels his fingers on his scalp, coaxing him.
His craned neck starts getting sore.
His tongue draws a slow ring around his own mouth, where their kissing left him smeared. He starts chewing the inside of his lip. He wishes he had water. He wishes he remembered what his legs felt like. He wiggles his bare feet where they’re flat and facing outward, the way he’s straddling him. He feels like he’s wearing shoes, but he’s not.
“You’re okay? How you do feel?”
Shane finally begins to lower his head. His whole stomach seems to drop with it. It’s not bad. It’s heavy. Really, really heavy. His eyes are too. They find Ilya’s eyes, which are a lot closer than he remembers from looking up for so long. Their noses touch. He nods, foggy. A long, slow smile then slinks across his face. “Really good.”
Ilya presses a soft kiss to the corner of his mouth. “Good.” When his deep voice comes out, Shane swears he can feel it in his own throat. Like it came out into the air and pushed inside his body.
Another quiet stretches in. Ilya nudges a kiss to him again, this time his jaw. “You’ll tell me if not?”
“Mhm. I’ll tell you.” Shane hears his own murmured voice. Every sound feels a little delayed.
Something is kind of wrong, but he can fix it. He’s just stiff. His knees on either side of him start to loosen and strain. He has to move, to twist. He isn’t sure how he lands where he does, more cradled in Ilya’s lap, against his chest, with his feet flat on the couch. Ilya’s shirt smells like him, that person smell, a smell he wishes he could bottle. His throat is really fucking dry.
“Keep talking,” Shane eventually murmurs against his chest. Some wet sticks there, where his mouth is creased open. He takes a long breath that smells like the shirt, and maybe his own weed breath.
There’s a soft laugh above him. “About what?”
“Anything,” Shane breathes. His eyes are closed, he thinks, but he can still see things. There’s a fuzzy, shifting static moving around. It reminds him of laundry cycles. It’s weird but not scary. Just really weird.
“There is a lot of things.”
The fingers in his hair haven’t stopped. He hopes they never stop. “Your blood. The blood thing. What’s that feel like?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Ilya muses above him. “I was much higher than this. And young. Very stupid. I would smoke and I would go for a walk. Was nothing special.”
"That sounds nice."
A comfortable quiet draws in. Somewhere inside it, Shane decides to tug on Ilya’s shirt with his mouth. It leaves a wet mark. The fabric feels weird on his teeth. He rubs his nose carefully inside the damp. He doesn’t like it, the itch near his gums the fabric leaves. He likes the warm feeling inside his chest, being so close he can do this. It’s one of the best feelings he’s ever felt, maybe. So much that he has to let it settle before he can say anything else.
When he does, he asks, “Are you high right now?”
He feels Ilya shrug against him. “A little.”
Something imaginary tugs at Shane’s smile again. He lifts his head from Ilya’s chest and tries to look up at him as much as he can. “Am I high?”
He’s met with Ilya’s eyes crinkled softly down at him. “I think so.” He isn’t smiling, but his eyes look really calm. And really, really blue.
Maybe he’s too high. He thinks that when he feels himself uncurling an arm from his body and reaching up toward Ilya’s face. He doesn’t quite touch him, just sees how close his finger can get.
Then he sees himself doing that, kind of, and wonders why. It just seems good to do. He hopes he doesn’t look stupid. “Is that okay?” he asks. There’s a deep, clumsy hesitance in his voice. “That I’m really high?”
“Mhm.” The hand once in his hair begins thumbing circles into the back of his neck. “You’re safe,” Ilya murmurs down to him. His curls hang toward his eyes as he lowers his head. Shane pulls gently on one. He worries it hurts. He frowns for a second, his brow wrinkling, but it doesn’t last. The curl stays out of place when he lets go.
Ilya grins amusedly down at him. “I think you are very high.” His curls fall more bending in, and Shane wants to touch more. He starts to tug them, one by one, fluffing through them with his knuckles, reaching like a cat batting at string.
“No I’m not,” Shane insists, or he tries to, but his smile gets so huge he can barely get the words out. “You’re high.”
“Not higher than you.”
“Nope. You definitely are.”
“No one is higher than you right now.”
Shane feels Ilya’s teasing on his face now, and then something else. The hair that had been tangled in his fingers brushes over his nose and mouth as Ilya leans down and deliberately rubs it there, soft and slow. It makes Shane laugh. It tickles, and it’s a lot, maybe the sharpest laugh he’s ever felt in his throat, especially with the burn still there. He hears himself laughing, and then the sound of both of them laughing together.
“I wanna go swimming.”
Ilya raises his brows at the suggestion, watching from the couch as Shane walks away and wobbles into his slide sandals. The fire pit has come to a low, extinguished roar. That makes most of the light come from the moon above the lake, and the stars wound above them. Some is from the cottage windows behind them, but very little.
It is too dark and Shane is too unsteady on his feet for Ilya to stay here. He pushes himself up, looser himself, and steps over a stone step to come to his side. Grabs Shane’s arm, leading his palm to his shoulder, to give him balance to get in his shoe. “Maybe not, hm?”
“I’m really hot.”
“We’ll go inside then.” Ilya almost adds how if they did he could take off his clothes, but Shane groans a loud protest before he can.
“C’mon. You’re so boring.”
Where Ilya’s held his arm in place he fists him deeper, under his armpit in challenge. “Me? Boring?” He gives him a shake. His grin becomes wolfish as Shane begins to laugh and squirm. “You are calling me boring?”
“Yeah, you.” He watches how Shane doubles over, can barely get the words out from his laughing that starts collapsing. He’s doubled in half over Ilya’s arm, that’s now holding him up. He wriggles and twists like it’s a pole he can’t move. “Most boring person, probably…probably ever.”
“You are my boring thing.” Ilya yanks him into his chest in a bear hug. He squeezes too hard around him, playfully snarling, like a monster who has gotten him. “You will sink to the bottom. That is how boring you are. Boring things can't swim.” Shane’s laughing becomes sputtering and panting, and never not grinning. Ilya could eat him whole, how sweet his face is when it's stuck that way.
Ilya plants a noisy kiss on the top of his head. “If we go, you hold onto me this whole time.”
He forgets sometimes how strong Shane is, wheezing still as he’s pushing out of his grip. He’s so used to handling his body for him, putting him how he wants.
Ilya adjusted to the dark enough, he doesn’t have to squint to watch the clumsy pedaling of Shane’s feet as he turns toward the dock. He watches him marching promptly down there, his feet slapping like a duck’s.
Ilya crosses his arms and watches him go, somewhat helplessly, but mostly endearingly. This is one version of relaxed, he thinks, a version of this he will say later. He feels a bit sluggish himself.
“I’m going!” Shane calls out. It calls Ilya to the fact he’s becoming less and less visible in the dark. His own slide sandals scuff down the stone and grass leading to the water.
Besides the moon there is something else. A pale light or something like it, pushes into view, as Shane steps out of his shorts. Nothing is underneath.
Ilya snorts a laugh from behind him, watching him wriggle off his shirt next, which seems very hard for him. He follows the path of clothes and picks them up as he goes. “Sit when you get there, please.” Ilya watches Shane swear and stumble onto the dock planks. He sucks in a breath and calls out again, playfully sharp but watchful. “Shane. Sit.”
Shane curses as he reaches the edge and checks himself hard, skidding to a stop. He wobbles on one leg, dangerously close to stepping right off it.
Ilya snorts, almost hesitates, then continues trudging towards him. It's all too fun to watch to think about stopping things, even if it’s a little stupid of them.
Shane finally drops down on the dock with an immature groan of protest.
Ilya hisses as Shane lands hard on his naked ass, like it’s his own body hitting the wood. “Fucking careful. You do not want splinters there.” He grumbles, but it’s still playful, darkened and mischievous. He reaches the start of the dock and drops their clothes, stepping out of his sweatpants and adding them last. He leaves his slides on. Then he leans over the hooked post nearby and sets two towels down for later.
As he's closer approaches more carefully than before, for reasons he can’t quite name, taking this in. He has to squint in the dark now, his eyes fixed on Shane, naked except his sandals, crosslegged and gazing mesmerized at the water that looks oily black at night.
When he gets close enough, Shane drops his head back. The night takes part of his face away, but not the lit, glazed eyes or the wide smile. Ilya leans down, palms his face from above, and growls a threat in his hair.
“I will kill you if you drown.”
Shane’s hands slap over Ilya’s wrists where they’re on his face. He uses them to try to lift himself up, to get closer. Ilya reads it easily. He closes the rest of the distance and kisses him, hard and demanding, just like his words.
When he pulls their mouths apart, Ilya thinks Shane looks sad for the first time tonight. Sad that the kissing stopped. It hits him in the chest. He thinks he’ll drag him into the black water and kiss him even more. He starts to do just that, taking Shane by both wrists and yanking him to his feet. Shane huffs and forgets his strength, pulling too hard and nearly hauling Ilya onto his own ass with the weight of it. They stumble into each other and start laughing again.
When Shane slips into the water is when he regrets things. The lake is too cold and too dark. His skin lights up with it. He feels too exposed to all of his senses. They’re just deep enough that he’s standing, but on the tips of his toes. That means when he’s not lifting up, water sits like a collar up to his neck.
The water laps where he wings out his arms and makes a slow circle of waves. It sounds so piercing at night. He focuses on that rather than the rest of his body. His slides fell off somewhere, floating away or stuck at the bottom. He realizes it when his bare toes sink into the deep, yielding mush beneath him. He’s not sure how he feels about it.
Even if he’s starting to feel weird, and a little not safe in his body, he thinks he can hide it. He doesn’t want to look stupid. He doesn’t want to ruin something fun for them. It’s fun still, anyway. He just wishes he could calm down. His heart feels like it’s started floating away from his chest, up his neck. He still can’t stop smiling, so much it’s even sore, when he squints down at the water to try and see his own reflection.
Then he slowly steers his arm around for his next big wave, and Ilya appears above it. Shane isn’t holding onto him like he was asked to, but they’re constantly close. It’s like an alligator, how Ilya lingers a little beneath him. His mouth is submerged, his nose and eyes aren’t. They look mischeviously up at him, menacing and light.
Shane looks over at him, his head a shockwave from being so deeply stared at. “What?” he pipes, sheepish, that and a little lost. He blinks hard, trying to clear the black water up. It doesn’t work. He rubs his eye with his wet hand. He thinks about it too much, like he usually would. He wonders if lake water turns poisonous at night, and if rubbing his eye just put parasites inside them. It makes his heart chug louder.
But he’s woken up suddenly, by two sturdy fists squeezing on the backs of his knees. He stumbles the best way you can in water. His toes drag through the muck stepping forward. It makes him shiver.
Ilya lifts his head out of the water, but in the neck-deep the rest of him is still submerged. Shane feels Ilya’s eyes settle carefully on him. He hopes they’re not seeing whatever he feels.
“Cold yet?”
“It feels good,” Shane answers softly, distracted. It’s the truth. He slinks lower to meet him, to prove that, until they’re at eye level. He even sinks his mouth into the water the way Ilya had done. He does, but his senses hate it.
Ilya must see that, somehow, because he lets go of one of Shane’s knee ditches and scoops his hand under his chin, pulling him up. “And you? Do you feel good?”
Shane tongues lake water off his mouth. Eventually he nods. Their eyes matching starts to lull him down. Looking in his eyes makes him want to be honest.
“The bottom’s gross,” he admits, and he’s disappointed in himself for saying it. “Feels gross.” He’s swum this lake a million times, usually barefoot. It's only now because his senses are inflamed; something nervous in his head is now humming at a constant. He lets himself slouch as he’s pulled forward into Ilya’s chest.
“Where are your shoes?” Ilya asks against his temple, with too much concern. Shane can feel him crane over his shoulder, as though looking for something. “Did you lose them?”
Shane doesn’t say anything. He just squirms closer and paddles in place, clumsily curling his legs until his feet are off the ground. His balance shifts when Ilya lets go of him. He keeps himself afloat, but it’s a change too quick for him to register. His brow furrows. He looks down at the ominous water, then back up again, in enough time to see Ilya’s head dunk beneath the surface. It scares him a stupid amount. What if he’s down there too long? What if he fucking drowns?
But Ilya does come back back up, and when he does he’s sputtering water and shaking hair from his brow. “Give me your foot,” he demands before spitting out some of the lake.
“What?” Shane doesn’t think his body would know how to do that right now. It’s just gotten used to floating. First they’re floating, and then his leg is stretching out. It’s a weird gravity pull. It’s actually a really relaxing stretch. He watches, removed from himself, as Ilya picks his leg up by the calf and wedges Shane’s foot into a rubbery slide sandal.
“They will be big on you. A little bit.” Ilya remarks as he thumbs the strap across Shane’s foot. He challenges gravity again, pulling Shane’s leg back down straight in the water, then reaches for his other calf. A couple more times he spits water out that must have gathered in his mouth with all the dunking.
Shane doesn’t help much. He watches with glassy eyes as his other bare foot is pulled from the water. “Are these yours?”
Ilya pushes on the other sandal, glancing coyly at him. “You will lose these too, hm? And you will get me new ones.”
The water is cold on Shane’s hot skin, which feels really good, but what’s happening right now feels even warmer, in a way he’s too high to explain. He can only say what he’s seeing.
“You’re putting my shoes on for me.”
Ilya tugs his leg closer, to kiss the bone of his ankle. “You lost yours.”
Shane watches him and feels his mouth more when he does. He starts to come back to himself. “You’re putting your shoes on me,” he corrects, thinking out dazedly out loud. His small smile spreads into something delirious. It might be what makes Ilya straighten up, his own feet bare in the muck now, as he pulls Shane closer by the hips.
“You can stand now.”
The words are pushed against his cheek. It’s so warm he barely understands them. They compute eventually, and he listens. He carefully pushes his legs back down, letting his covered feet sink into the lake bottom.
He looks back at Ilya again, where his eyes are already on him, already looking. He bites at his smile and comes closer, tugging the sides of Ilya’s waist. He remembers he’s naked now. They’re both naked. Their chests are close together. Their hips are touching.
It feels like a long time they stand like that, Shane's arms coiled around his waist, Ilya’s hands pushing his fingers down his back in the water and up again. It’s freezing and burning at the same time. Finally he can relax into this feeling, this new thing that he might never do again.
Someone kisses someone. It’s him who does it, he thinks, with his mouth feeling like rubber. Or it does until Ilya gives him his tongue. Whatever brick of tension he was holding onto, his body swallows it. His shoulders fall. His heart drops back down from his throat. Everything does.
He tips closer because they’re naked. While they lazily kiss he runs his fingers down the center of Ilya’s chest, down his stomach, to his navel. His body feels different when he touches it in the water, even different than the shower. He wants to feel how different, and everywhere.
Ilya sighs rough in his mouth, when Shane wraps his hand around his cock. It isn’t hard. He strokes him once, slow, and feels that start to change, to reshape in his palm. He pushes his grin against him, feeling Ilya’s teeth where he’s grinning too. There are hands on his ass now, squeezing tight, making him quiver between their mouths.
It can just be this. They don’t need to fuck. He just wants everything touching everything else.
There’s that and their breathing, warm and close together; and then there’s a yelp. Their bodies jerk apart.
“Yebat!”
Suddenly Ilya flinches and twists in Shane’s arms. His knee hikes close enough that Shane feels it almost nail him in the balls.
“Something touched me,” Ilya insists, whipping around as fast as water allows.
Shane is stunned at first, his stomach flipping. Then he’s grinning again, sinking lower into the water, because he knows how this goes. “It’s probably a fish.”
“Only small fish here?” Ilya starts carefully toeing away, his nose dipping toward the water as he looks down, obviously unable to see anything. “Is a small lake.” It sounds more like he’s convincing himself out loud than asking.
Shane watches low from the waterline as Ilya’s brow pushes as deep toward his nose as it can go, the way it does when he’s scared-acting-confused. “Sure,” Shane offers innocently. “You can pretend that.”
Ilya turns sharply and sinks down again to eye level. “Don’t.” He warns.
“What?” Shane chirps back. “You’re totally right.” It’s Shane now, being the big fish. He starts circling him in a wide, careful paddle swim. “There’s definitely no giant fish in here. No giant squids, either. Maybe sharks. Giant ones, probably.”
Ilya stands straighter than Shane’s circling lets him, tracking him with a cranky squint. “Not funny,” he says in a warning tone, but there’s a smirk breaking through.
Shane swats at him beneath the water. “Very funny, actually.”
Ilya moves fast, or Shane moves slow, because suddenly his wrist is snatched in a fist and he’s yanked closer like a hook on a line.
“You’re—” His laughter bubbles through the wave his dragged body makes. “You’re scared of birds and fish. That’s like half the animals!”
His body is loose and heavy enough, plus the weightlessness of the water, that he’s strangled easily back to Ilya’s chest. It rumbles with retort. “And you are scared of lake mud.”
“Shut up.”
One hand holds him firm at the hip, planting him there. The other, which once stroked through his hair, now claws his wet locks so they tickle his eyelashes. He squeezes his eyes shut. Breath comes warm and hot on his face.
“I caught the lake monster,” Ilya says dangerously, cockily, flattening down the curtain of hair. “What do I do with it?”
Shane tries to huff, but it’s snorting laughter instead. He tries a little to shake away. He actually doesn’t want to get away at all. His own hair feels smooth and soft on his forehead. “Put me back,” he pretends miserably, like a fish caught in a net.
“I will not put you back.” The thick hand scraping his forehead becomes the hand squeezing his cheek.
Shane’s eyes flutter open just as Ilya pushes his mouth to his, then fall shut again. The kiss deepens and he feels swallowed by it, more than by the black water or the heavy mud. He swallows Ilya too, rolling through him with his tongue, nipping once at his lip. He bites too hard, careless and hazy, and Ilya hisses before surging back into him, snapping their mouths together so their teeth click. It rattles Shane all the way to his skull.
“Sorry,” Shane murmurs, already kissing through the apology. Ilya snorts while yanking him closer. Shane laughs too. The sound buzzes through him, louder than the water bugs skipping the surface, the ones he thought were stars.
It pulls him deeper than the greasy black water ever could: the thick way Ilya kisses him, the way his tongue coaxes through his mouth as he cradles his head to keep it from dipping under. How he can breathe so harshly and wanting against him and still touch him so gently.
He’s swallowed again when Ilya pulls back, panting, long enough to murmur against his cheekbone. His voice curls hoarse and warm. “Do you feel better?”
Shane drags his way back to his mouth, nodding honestly against him.