frankie

ahhhh yes i absolutely put thought into this and i love that u noticed it !!! they both go through the journey of exclusively referring to each other by last names in their internal monologue, then slipping in a single first name, switching between the two for a bit, and then settling into first names. i wanted this to happen before they ever say it aloud because i don't think you accidentally call someone by their first name aloud unless you've really come to view that as the default way of referring to them in your head and you just let your guard down for a second, right? i knew i wanted their first time saying the names aloud to be in this intimate climax of the story after ilya's dad's death, so i made sure to work up to it for a while

the way i looked at it was that for each of them, the switch to a first name inside their head would happen in a moment that represented uncharted intimacy to them

it happens for ilya first, and happens during sex. ilya's someone who has a lot of sex and has never found it very intimate before. he and shane have even been hooking up for a while without him noticing the change it's putting inside him. in chapter 12, he's beginning to have a tough time emotionally -- his dad's illness is beginning to show, alexei has been calling him a lot and therefore ilya can't escape the reminders of his oppressive childhood. the lack of care he has around him feels very stark, and the more he thinks about family/childhood, the more he's aware of that own contrast in a sort of pre-irinas-death vs post-irinas-death way. he has anonymous sex with women in this chapter and finds it oddly unsatisfying. after finding out definitively about his father's illness, he actively avoids shane and hooks up with someone else, and ends up sleeping alone, and is really isolated and sad. then he sleeps with shane again. this is contrastingly extremely intimate and ilya's getting an emotional connection from it that he can't name or admit to.

i wrote in the most recent chapter that ilya often uses sex to figure out things about himself -- that as a teenager he used it to figure out his sexuality, charisma, relationship to his body, friendship with svetlana, etc. here he does the same. he can't explain why sleeping with other people is not comforting him anymore and sleeping with shane is, but it happens subconsciously, and he slips into using shane's first name in his inner monologue during that moment of intimacy, because his body can tell what his brain hasn't caught up with yet -- that sex with shane is comforting, rather than just sexual, and he hasn't really experienced emotional comfort since his mother died

for shane, it's completely different. his first name moment comes when ilya visits the hollanders at their family cottage. the way i justified this was because: shane has a very divided relationship between sex and his personal life. he compartmentalises. he really convinces himself that sex with men (ilya) is something he biologically wants, but has nothing to do with his emotional life (he's lying sooo hard to himself)

the first time shane thinks of ilya by his first name is in this line, as ilya meets his parents at the cottage: For a moment, as they all stand there, Shane notices that he and Ilya are kind of mirroring his parents’ position – stood shoulder-to-shoulder, two sets of two.

he makes the switch to first names in the first moment that he compares himself and ilya to his parents. to shane, who grew up with this incredibly strong example of partnership in his parents, everything he can imagine about intimacy comes from them. it's emotional, loving, domestic, soft, sweet. they support each other. he would never have thought of himself and ilya in those terms, but in this moment, while they all stand under the same roof, something inside shane's mind can't imagine being as cold and distant with your partner as he is with ilya up until now. his parents would never call each other by last names. in a way, by allowing himself to become a little more emotionally open here, shane's mirroring his parents, taking cues from them as he so often does in his life, a luxury that ilya has never had

his parents even talk about referring to ilya by his first name, before he arrives. they're not including shane in that instruction, but he's there and notices it; it's the first time he's had this encouragement to think of ilya outside of a hockey and lockerroom context, really. the ilya who's staying at the cottage with them is notably different to team-ilya, in his parents' minds, and therefore they won't call him by his last name while he's here. for shane this kickstarts the idea of things being different at the cottage, and enables a lot of the new, brave intimacy he and ilya experience during the visit.

i would say that for shane the moment of increased intimacy all comes from feeling safe, with his parents at his family home away from their lives in hockey, and therefore free to think of their relationship in a more intimate context. while for ilya it comes from feeling out of control, and being desperate for comfort in a moment where shane is the only person he can seem to take it from, even if he doesn't yet understand why

hands were shaking at the speed with which i drew this — inspired heavily by this post and obviously recent events

me: THAT'S THE FUCKING POINT!!! ilya doesn't want him to know!!! ilya was told he's weak and lazy his whole life, and he cultivates a public persona that's the antithesis - hypermasculine, dominant, aggressive, confident. shane and ilya's established dynamic is ilya being the experienced, reassuring, playful dom. he doesn't want to admit that he needs help to manage his depression, doesn't want to admit he feels isolated and resentful and needs reassurance/comfort. admitting that feels like proving he is weak, he does need help, he is needy, and that he's a bad partner for wanting more than he's willing to ask for.

and shane does notice. he says he should spend time with the cens, talks about therapy, even supports ilya when he comes out to troy despite his own fears about being outed. shane also has limited experience being the initiator, feels out of depth with social cues, and doesn't suffer from the same childhood abuse ilya suffered from. they also both are in hypermasculine, violent careers where neither person feels comfortable being who they are - whether that's being queer, having a mental disorder, racial and language barriers, etc. - that affect their communication style.

What Ilya is volunteering here when he says, "I like girls, but I also like you," is the idea of putting what he has with Shane on the same level as what he might have, in a fully societally-sanctioned way, with a woman. The question isn't really about whether or not Shane likes girls -- it's about whether Shane can acknowledge that he likes men and/or Ilya the same way he might like (might be expected to like, expects himself to like) girls.

Why would Ilya care whether Shane is gay vs. bi? He doesn't. He wants to know what Shane is perhaps getting up to with girls, if anything, presumably in private since he hasn't heard of anything, so he can gauge where their thing ranks in Shane's life, if Shane is even consciously ranking it at all. He's probing whether Shane is interested in/capable of seeing what they have as a relationship, as anything other than "a bad idea."

And Ilya is precisely right to probe this, because Shane isn't acknowledging it to himself yet! Shane is so utterly drawn to Ilya, yet his internal self-talk is still completely about how he shouldn't be doing this, can't keep doing this, he keeps going back to him because his resolve is weak, he'll end it next time, etc. etc. He absolutely refuses to entertain an image of himself as a queer man who is simply and normally and mutually attracted to Ilya, which means he is deluding himself out of the context he needs to interpret Ilya's overtures here.

Ilya begins by describing his relationship with Svetlana as long-standing and intimate both sexually and personally but ultimately not romantic and, more importantly, not threatening to what he might feel towards certain other people who may or may not be sitting on his sofa eating a tuna melt. I mean, for all Ilya knows, Shane might have turned this around and said, "well sure, of course, that sounds the same as what we're doing: we're old friends now who fuck regularly because it's convenient but it's not more than that," and that would be an answer for Ilya. But that would require Shane to admit to himself that yes, he is regularly fucking a man in a way he enjoys and means to continue, and he's still so far from being able to do that! So instead, all Shane hears from Ilya is a locker room brag, just another element of their 'rivalry' where Ilya can beat him by pulling more women than he ever could or wanted to.

And when Ilya offers, "I like girls, but I also like you," what is Shane not able to say in response to Ilya offering that he likes both girls and Shane? That he likes Ilya back. He can lie that he likes women, 'of course' he likes women, but silence re: liking men/Ilya. He has not reckoned with his attraction to men/Ilya in relation to his self-perception at all, and that is why Ilya is asking, what Ilya is nudging him to do, in the most relaxed, comforting, safe environment that Ilya could think of to create for them. The phone call bails Shane out, and he's able to bring things back around to more "meaningless" sex without fielding any more personal questions that he can't answer. But obviously the sex is not meaningless and when Ilya slips up and uses Shane's first name and Shane responds in kind, Shane is confronted with the idea that what they're doing isn't some kind of "blowing off steam" mutually meaningless whatever thing, that that's not how Ilya has been viewing it, so he panics. The idea that Ilya has been pursuing sex with Shane while actively conceiving of himself (and almost certainly, by extension, Shane) as a queer man, and now might even be trying to pursue something more with him, throws water on all Shane's self-delusions.

From Ilya's perspective, Shane's response is devastating. Ilya may as well have fallen for a straight guy, for all that Shane is available to him, for all that Shane is able to acknowledge his queerness to anyone at this point, including himself. Shane publicly dating Rose is the final nail in the coffin -- Ilya has clearly spooked him so badly by trying to talk about their relationship in any terms other than "a bad idea" that Shane had to get a celebrity girlfriend to push their hookups back into meaninglessness.