i have a personality flaw that always positions me on the side of characters who are hiding everything and refuse to accept help. like do NOT confide in people. confiding in people is the enemy. REAL winners lie and lie and continue lying until they ruin every single thing theyve got going for them & didnt fix a single goddamn thing. keep digging grandpa youre almost there

i have cracked the code. ilya is so convinced that he is a toxic poisonous shipwreck of a person and so he’s an asshole to people as a form of intimacy testing. what this means is that he goes sorryforpartyrocking mode and does body shots and then 30 minutes later he’s snot crying in an alley because he is #disregulated and someone is like “uh hey man are you okay” and ilya is like (scary face) “i am FINE” and obviously they can tell he’s not fine but also nobody wants to call him on it because there’s a large man acting unpredictably in an alley. and then shane’s deal is just that he is autistic and completely misses the social cue that he’s supposed to leave. so instead he’s like “ilya i don’t think it’s true that you are fine because i can see that you are snot crying in an alley. it’s really rude to lie to people ilya.” and ilya is like “oh my god for the first time in my life someone prevails through my masterful facade… he sees me….”

I love the bathroom scene (bathroom scene my beloved) because yes ilya eventually handles the situation masterfully and regains the upper hand or whatever but you can tell how hard he’s winging it. second by second this man is flying by the seat of his pants. he’s not some suave sexy self-assured dom he’s like twenty-two and an idiot and he made shane cry which he genuinely didn’t know he had the power to do and now he’s scrambling to figure out what a suave sexy self-assured dom would do to fix it (while still seeming suave and sexy and self-assured of course). to me the beauty of ilya as a sexual and emotional being is that he is ALWAYS just making it up as he goes while simultaneously trying to project an aura of cool unflappable confidence. and he fools shane completely right up until tampa when shane is suddenly like ‘wait. hold on a minute. you have NO fucking clue what you’re doing do you’ and takes the reins.

listen I understand why anyone writing a bodyguard au for hollanov defaults to ilya being the body guard and shane being the superstar. but I just think we're collectively sleeping on the appeal of playboy celeb ilya rozanov getting scuffed like a kitten by his deadpan, no nonsense security detail, shane hollander