i think holmberg starts them off with good luck babe since it's her big breakthrough hit and ilya is like "hm. so this is a song about being in a relationship with someone who's in denial about being gay? and they won't admit to the relationship because of it? interesting" while staring directly at shane who is making very determined eye contact with the floor.

and holmberg (clueless) is like "yeah she writes a lot of situationship anthems actually!" and puts on casual.

which allows shane to pull an instant uno reverse card and stare daggers into the side of ilya's head while going "wow, imagine what it would be like to spend years sleeping with someone who sends really confusing mixed signals by saying that what you have is casual but then treating you like it's not casual at all. that would suck."

like the way he asked "what is nur-ate-iv?" makes me think man TRULY was not catching all of the words getting tossed at him so fast the second his eyes were even a LITTLE open. like he wasn't asking "what story did you come up with?" he's asking "what word are you even saying to me right now?" man got like 0.2 seconds to be like "oh i'm awake now?" before he was getting PELTED with english because shane had a forty step plan that couldn't wait like. three more hours.

Ilya at the cottage.

Ilya wanted to tell Shane that it had been one of the best days of his life. It had been awkward, sure, but Ilya felt that, if he hadn’t quite been already, he would be welcomed into Shane’s family, and that was no small thing. In fact, to Ilya, who had barely been welcome in his own family, it was huge.

He wanted to tell Shane that the closest he felt to home was when he was with him. It didn’t matter if it was in a hotel room, or Ilya’s apartment, or at that weird hideout building Shane bought in Montreal, or here at Shane’s cottage; he was himself when he was with Shane. He’d left Russia, he was uneasy in America, and he’d spent his entire adult life drifting between continents and between lovers.

But now he had been reeled in by this annoying Canadian, and all that he knew was that he wanted to stay. He wanted to anchor himself to Shane and just...stay.

he is attracted to women. he likes fucking women. and by book canon, he attributes his attraction to men at “20 percent….maybe 30 percent”. he does have a preference for women. and I know that kills your yaoi dreams for that to be canon, but bisexual people/characters do not exist to fulfill your yaoi headcanons. they don’t exist to facilitate your threesome guilt. the fact of Ilya’s character is that he is bisexual, he prefers women, and he happened to fall in love with a man.

Shane even brings it up when he comes out to Ilya ‘shut up you’re not gay’ ‘no, not completely’ ‘well I think I am, completely’…like, Shane’s fears about how Ilya doesn’t have to choose him like he has to choose Ilya are what holds him back from saying how he feels. The fact that Ilya has a real chance to make a f/m relationship work in a way that Shane does not is where a lot of his insecurity in admitting to himself how deeply he’s fallen for him stems from. And we can argue the finer points on whether that fear is problematic or rooted in some level of biphobia or not, I’m not trying to erase that, but I don’t think we can argue that it doesn’t play a role in the story.

To me, I think the fact that there is that fear there, that chance that Ilya could end up with a woman For Real, is part of what drives Shane into going for it in admitting his feelings. It’s narratively super important - even at the cottage, when Ilya’s talking about marrying svetlana for a green card, their discussion on how Ilya could find some woman he loves and marry her for real is the catalyst for Ilya being honest about how much he thinks about Shane, which in turn is the catalyst for Shane coming up with the Ottawa plan and the boys telling each other they love each other. That plot falls apart without the reality that Ilya could end up with a woman. Additionally, I think that the fact Ilya does have other options actually makes his choice to pick Shane anyway more meaningful. It deepens their love, rather than weakens it. Just as Shane’s struggle to accept himself and admit his sexuality deepens how meaningful it is for him to admit his love for Ilya.