Obviously Ilya is attracted to Shane, but I also think the fact that Shane is a man, and is as tall as he is, and is so muscular, and can obviously take a serious beating like it's nothing is probably also comforting to Ilya, and so much fun.
I think it's generally agreed upon fanon that Ilya probably wasn't doing a lot of kinky stuff with his casual hookups but personally, I doubt that's true. Given how many he's hooked up with - and like, let's do the math here for a second. If on average he hooked up with somebody even once a month between 2009-2017 that's nearly a hundred people. And we know he was hooking up with people before that, and we arguably have reason to believe he was hooking up with people more frequently than that during those years.
So, let's say Ilya has slept with a couple hundred people. That's a lot of women who were probably not as tall as him, and not as muscular, and not regularly getting slammed into the boards, right. And given that number, there's no way a fair amount of them weren't kinky and Ilya, pleasure dom that he is, wouldn't turn them down.
But Ilya also grew up in an abusive home watching his father be "so hard" on his mom, which, even if we don't get carried away with what we extrapolate from that, probably gave baby dom Ilya a lot of self-disgust about his own desires or his own willingness to satisfy specific desires in others.
And then there was Shane. And Shane was not only so eager to obey, and so visibly enjoyed being ordered around, and manhandled, and roughly fucked - Ilya literally never had to hesitate. He never had to hold back. He never had to panic that he'd taken it too far. Shane could take it and he knew it because Shane took much worse on the ice all the time. It's just another thing that I think set Shane apart for Ilya. With Shane, Ilya found his equal and he could just let go and really fully enjoy himself without any fear or restraint or self-disgust. Idk. Sex with Shane was as liberating for Ilya as sex with Ilya was for Shane.
