Per The Url

He is also aware that he is a large man, a hockey player, and any type of violent-looking motion is going to be judged and he'll be called short-tempered or violent.

The violence of hockey helps. Sometimes, he likes getting slammed against the boards or pinned there while fighting for the puck. But that doesn't help him off ice. He has a punching bag, but its not the same. Wrestling with Ilya or Ilya laying on top of him also helps, but it's not perfect.

A couple years into their marriage, he tells this to Ilya. He works hard on sharing these things, that he'd usually worried about being judged for, to his husband. Ilya's already so vulnerable with him that he tries to return the favor as well as he can.

A week after he tells this to Ilya, he walks into their home gym to find Ilya attaching velcro strips to the walls in the corner Shane usually does yoga in, where there is no weights, equipment, or mirrors . There's a stack of huge gymnastic mats next to him, velcro on their edges. There are also boxing gloves on top of the stack.

"If anyone sees," Ilya says without turning around. "They will think this is for boxing. I recently took this up, you see."

Shane swallowed. "What is it actually for?"

Ilya grabbed a large mat, taller than him even, and pressed it against the wall, pulling to test that it's firmly stuck on there.

Ilya then takes a couple steps back and throws himself into the wall.

Shane takes a startled step back. "What are you doing?"

"Didn't hurt at all," Ilya grinned, now sitting on one of the mats on the floor. He bonked the back of his head back against the mat. "Completely safe."

Shane cheeks flushed. "I don't need this."

"Okay," Ilya bonked his head harder. "Its for me, then. Maybe I let you use it sometimes."

"Ilya...," Shane walked over and climbed in Ilya's lap, face in the crook of his neck.

"Shane," Ilya said back, wrapping his hands around him. "You know there is nothing you could do that I would think is weird?"

"This is weird."

"Well," Ilya hummed. "I have had my tongue in your asshole, so this is-"

"Shuddup!" Shane slaps him on the shoulder.

The set up goes unused until a couple weeks later, when Shane is feeling like there are ants under his skin. He tells Ilya he's going to work out in the gym, but based on the blush on his cheeks, Ilya understands what he's saying. Ilya tells him he'll go for a run, recognizing Shane wants privacy to test this out.

When he gets back, all he asks Shane is, "anything hurt?"

We see this a little bit when she waits while Shane's 'freaking out' to see how Ilya will handle it.

She likes that Shane has another person in his life that can support him - one that he is probably much more receptive to than his mom and dad. Yuna knows about that first hand - it was so much easier to let David bare some of her burden than her parents. And vice versa.

So Yuna has no problem stepping back and allowing Ilya to be Shane's main support person.

Yuna: Hi honey! Just saw the game. Is Shane okay? Ilya: He is okay. Very grumpy though so maybe no phone calls tonight.

Yuna loves that Shane has such a wonderful, understanding partner to lean on. It's really all a parent wants, to know that their child will be taken care of. And Yuna is very confident Ilya will take care of her Shane.

The first time she's absolutely confident of that is when Shane is downright angry.

"No, mom, it's fucking ridiculous," Shane fumes, blinking. He's gotten better over the years, but when he was little, he couldn't get angry without crying.

"I know," Yuna agrees with him because that is usually the best thing to do. She glances over at Ilya, who seems relatively unbothered at Shane's anger.

"It's in the contract for a reason," Shane continued, paused, and then smacked his hand on the table. Not hard, but hard enough.

At that, Ilya stood up. "Come on."

"What?"

"We are going to the rink," Ilya stated simply, grabbing his and Shane's jackets from the coat rack.

Yuna winced. Shane didn't get angry too often, but ordering Shane around when he was angry never went well. He was going to-

"Fine," Shane said tightly, grabbing the jacket Ilya held out to him and walking through the door Ilya held open.

Yuna raised her eyebrows.

"I will fix," Ilya said quietly to her, smiling. "Tire him out. We will be back before dinner."

"Okay," Yuna smiled back, surprised.

As she locked the door behind Ilya, she found herself realizing she really trusted Ilya with Shane.

He was so confident with what Shane needed, so in step with him. After years of hearing how her son was emotionless, hard to read, anti-social, blank stare, etc. She knew he wasn't. He was so expressive and she didn't understand how others couldn't see that. But Ilya could read him so well - he always seemed to know what he needed, even when she didn't.

“For you,” he says, pink-cheeked and sparkly-eyed as he takes Ilya’s hand. “Can I…?”

Ilya manages to nod, struck silent as Shane’s smile widens and he clumsily, but gently, puts the ring on his finger. It settles in right next to his wedding band as if it had always been there.

“Oh good,” he hears Shane say over the rush of blood in his ears. “I got the size right this time.”

“Good construction Hollzy!” someone- Wyatt maybe?- says.

“Thanks Hayesy, I’ve been practicing.”

Practicing?

“Well, yeah,” Shane says, and Ilya realizes he must have said that out loud. “I needed to make sure it was perfect, after all.”

Given the catcall they get, the way Ilya lunges and kisses him in response might be a little unhinged and over-the-top.

"How many hours do you think we have spent kissing?" he asks.

Shane scrunches his face. "Why?"

"A thousand?" Ilya suggests, ignoring the question.

"Maybe." Shane sets to actually calculating it. They're been married for three years, after three years of dating and about ten of... whatever they were doing before that. There are some days when they probably kiss for hours, slow makeouts that aren't even leading to sex. Other days, their sex is hungry and fast and they kiss through it, equaling at least thirty minutes of lip-to-lip contact. 3 years of living together is over a thousand days, so if you were to average it—

"Five thousand?" Ilya interrupts Shane's train of thought.

"Maybe. That sounds like a lot."

"Is not enough, though," Ilya shrugs. "We need ten thousand."

"Says who?" Shane laughs and moves his right foot to gently poke Ilya's stomach.

"Says me. And Malcolm Gladwell," he holds up his book and then reads directly from it. "In order to achieve true mastery in a field, you must dedicate ten thousand hours of practice to it."

Shane rolls his eyes. "You're an expert at kissing, I promise."

and when shane finally does get a girlfriend when they're like eighteen, ilya seduces and fucks her. he thinks about shane the entire time and is absolutely furious with himself about it. he casually tells shane about it like a week later because as angry as he is at himself for doing something so terrible, he's equally angry at shane for making him feel this way and it makes him want to be cruel.

ilya: hollander i want to get you pregnant

because in my opinion, that call told us a lot of important things. the main one being that Shane canonically has slept with/hooked up with other men.

like in the show it really looks like Shane is completely tied to Ilya and while yes, he does also have a couple of moments with other men. and it just isn’t the same.

In the PROLOGUE we are told as much:

“It was bad enough that he loved being fucked so much, that he loved having a dick in his mouth. But for it to have to be this son of a bitch, to the point that on the extremely rare occasion when it wasn’t, Shane was left wanting...”

and then in the FaceTime call:

He saw Shane’s shoulder lift in a tiny shrug. “I’ve never...had anything. Like this. With anyone else.”

“You have not been with another man?” Ilya may have held his breath as he waited for the answer.

“I have.”

Ilya exhaled. Of course he had.

—

“There’s not much to tell. He was big. He looked like he was, y’know, what I was looking for.”

“A big, strong top?” Shane looked so embarrassed, Ilya took pity. “Was he? What you needed?”

“No. I mean, sort of. But...”

“Did he hurt you?”

“No. He just wasn’t...”

Ilya needed to hear it. “Wasn’t what?”

Shane clenched his eyes shut and said, “You. He wasn’t you.”

personally I feel like this or some part of this should have been included in the TV show because I think it’s important to show that Shane tried! Not only with Rose but with other men too. And no matter what, it was always Ilya.

Ilya in this moment has to reckon with the knowledge that Shane had to seek out other men because what they had wasn’t keeping Shane sated. (probably in times where Ilya hadn’t been seeing Shane because loving him made it so hard) and then to have Shane say, they weren’t you. Ilya NEEDED to hear this. he needed to know that it wasn’t just that he was convenient and easy. Shane only feels that way about him.

Ilya was able to sleep with women because they were so different from Shane but he acknowledges early on in the book that he no longer hooks up with men other than Shane. I think they showed that well in the show when he rejects Sasha. Then we see him steadily grow discontented by his casual hookups with women. implying that while he might sleep with them every so often, it is not how it had been before and it is probably for a release more than anything.

Billy: Are you done?