Heated
Happy Valentine's Day!
Noah’s relationship with impulse purchases had always been a complicated one. He was the kind of person who could agonize over whether a seven dollar sandwich was worth the money but would then turn around and drop three hundred dollars on a collector’s edition Blu-ray set without blinking, so the fact that he’d spent what amounted to several months’ rent on a pair of experimental bodysuits from a website he’d found through a Reddit thread at two in the morning was honestly pretty on-brand for him. What was less on-brand was the fact that he’d managed to keep it a secret from John for three entire weeks, which might have actually been the longest Noah had ever kept anything from his boyfriend. He was a terrible liar and an even worse secret-keeper and the only reason he hadn’t cracked under the pressure was because every time he’d come close to confessing, he’d pulled up a gif of Hudson Williams and remind himself exactly why he was doing this.
The Heated Rivalry adaptation had, to put it mildly, absolutely wrecked him. Noah had always been susceptible to getting overly invested in fictional relationships but this one had gone beyond the usual territory of rewatching favorite scenes and reading fanfiction online. The show had gotten under his skin in a way that felt almost physical, and it was the combination of factors that made it so devastating: the writing was phenomenal, the chemistry between the two leads was electric, and both Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie were so unfairly attractive that Noah had genuinely struggled to decide which one he’d rather climb like a tree. Shane Hollander was all quiet intensity and carefully hidden emotion, this beautiful repressed Canadian with dark eyes and a jawline that could cut glass, while Ilya Rozanov was thick, brash and Russian with a smile that made Noah’s stomach do backflips every time it appeared on screen. John had caught him pausing on a shirtless scene of Hudson for the third time during a single episode and had simply raised an eyebrow, to which Noah had responded with the dignified defense of “the lighting in this shot is really well done.”
Unsurprisingly, John did not believe him based on the way he rolled his eyes and grinned at him.
But it wasn’t just the attractiveness of the leads that had burrowed into Noah’s brain and set up permanent residence. It was the love story, the way Shane and Ilya had spent years gravitating towards each other while pretending they weren’t, the hotel rooms, the stolen moments, and the way they communicated so much through physical proximity that the dialogue almost became secondary. It reminded him of his own relationship in its best moments, back when things between him and John had that same crackling energy, and somewhere in the middle of a late-night rewatch he’d started to wonder whether there was a way to bring some of that intensity back.
It wasn’t as if things were awful between them, it truly wasn’t. But after living together for four years and doing long distance for another four prior, time had filed away some of the sharper edges of their dynamic. Noah missed the electricity, the feeling of not being able to keep his hands to himself, the early days when every touch had felt significant. He wanted that back. Then, to his shock, the universe, in its occasionally terrifying sense of perfect timing, presented him with a website a few days later that claimed to sell experimental character bodysuits with integrated personality and memories, where Noah had thought to himself: well, that’s either the coolest thing I’ve ever seen or the most elaborate scam on the internet… and there’s only one way to find out.
Now the two boxes were sitting on his bed: matte black, identical, and completely unbranded apart from the elegant tags identifying their contents as either belonging to Shane Hollander or Ilya Rosanov. Whenever he turned and glanced at the boxes, Noah’s heart began to rush so fast that he’d grow mildly concerned about the structural integrity of his chest cavity. At the same time, John was out picking up groceries and wouldn’t be back for at least another half hour, which was exactly the window Noah had been counting on. The plan, such as it was, involved putting on the Shane suit, getting his bearings, and then surprising John when he walked through the door and hopefully using this new body to convince his partner to join him in the other bodysuit. It was either going to be the most exciting thing they’d ever done together or the single stupidest decision of Noah’s life, and the fact that he genuinely could not predict which outcome was more likely did nothing to slow his hands down as he unlatched the lid on the Shane box and lifted it open.
The suit was folded inside with an almost obsessive neatness and Noah’s breath caught the moment he peeled back the tissue paper inside and saw it. It looked real in a way that the photographs on the website had completely failed to communicate. The skin was that specific warm olive complexion that Shane Hollander had inherited from his Japanese-Canadian mother, smooth and even and convincing enough that for a disorienting second Noah’s brain struggled to not believe there was an actual person folded up in the box. The detail was insane: individually rendered arm hair, veins mapped across the backs of the hands with anatomical precision, fingernails with tiny imperfections that no prop designer would ever bother to include. When Noah reached in and touched it, he actually flinched because the material was warm. Even more alarming was the faint pulse thrumming beneath the surface, steady and patient, like a resting heartbeat.
Upon pulling out the suit, Noah found a small instruction card resting on the bottom of the box. To his frustration, the note was brief and completely unhelpful in helping prepare the man to understand how this entire process worked:
Please remove all clothes before putting on the suit. Upon stepping in feet first, the suit will begin to manually attach and pull itself up and around you.
Do not be alarmed and do not resist!
After reading it, the man couldn’t resist letting out a small huff that was equal parts frustration and disbelief at what he was attempting to do. The suit’s gonna attach itself to me… And it doesn’t want me to resist? How the hell am I supposed to do that!?
Despite reading the note a few more times, no revelations occurred to Noah and he was left to continue onwards with the limited information he had been given. As such, he set the card down and began to remove his clothes. Once this was complete, the man grabbed onto the suit and allowed most of it to unfurl down and pool onto the floor as he prepared to pull it on. Upon taking a deep breath and feeling a wide grin spread across his cheeks, he lifted his right leg and pushed it into the suit via the open seam along the spine.
As soon as his foot disappeared into the suit, the first thing Noah registered was heat, a wet and enveloping warmth that closed around his toes, the sole of his foot, and his ankle with a purposefulness that immediately made it clear this was not a passive process. The material wasn’t just receiving his foot; it was actively taking it, sealing against his skin with an intimacy that erased every boundary between his body and the suit’s interior. “Oh, fuck,” Noah breathed, partly because the sensation was genuinely startling and partly because he could already feel something happening to his calf, a deep rolling pressure that was somehow reaching beneath his skin and rearranging what it found there. It didn’t hurt, which surprised him, but it was intense in a way that made his fingers tighten on the edge of the mattress. He could actually see the change happening in real time: the pale, soft flesh of his calf compressing and reshaping into something leaner and more defined, the warm olive tone growing more and more lifelike, and muscle definition appearing where there had previously been none. By the time the process finished, his lower leg looked like it belonged to somebody who had been training seriously for their entire life. Even the chronic twinge in his right knee, a souvenir from his soccer days that he’d long since accepted as a permanent feature, had completely vanished! Noah flexed the new calf experimentally and watched the muscle respond with a crispness that his own leg had absolutely never been capable of.
“Holy shit,” he whispered.
His left leg followed and this time the nervousness had mostly been replaced by a giddy, disbelieving excitement. The suit swallowed his leg inch by inch with that same thorough, methodical warmth and Noah watched his thigh, the one he’d always been a bit self-conscious about because it was soft and shapeless and very much the thigh of a man whose primary form of exercise was walking to the fridge, compress into something taut and athletic and completely foreign to him. By the time both legs were done the difference was so dramatic that standing up felt like piloting a new vehicle. His center of gravity had shifted, his balance was different, and there was a coiled, spring-loaded quality to the muscles that made him feel like he could break into a sprint without a second’s notice. He took a few steps across the bedroom carpet just to feel them work and actually laughed out loud at how responsive they were. Every movement was precise and effortless in a way that made his normal body feel like it had been operating on dial-up internet his entire life. “Okay,” he said to the empty room, a wide and somewhat manic grin spreading across his face. “Okay. We’re really doing this…”
Out of nowhere though, Noah was pulled out of his enjoyment as he could feel the suit’s attention then turn to the area between his legs. As he sucked in a breath, the man’s mind found himself finding this stage something he was both simultaneously anticipating and dreading. The reshaping was thorough and deeply intimate, a systematic reorganization of his most private anatomy that left absolutely no detail unaddressed. Noah had always been reasonably satisfied with what he was working with, a respectable seven inches with a level of girth that did the job more than adequately, so feeling himself being restructured into something noticeably different was a strange experience on multiple levels. The end result was more compact and refined, 5.5 inches, slender, and neatly proportioned with the warm, even skin tone that characterized the rest of his new body.
And while it was objectively smaller than what he’d started with, the sensitivity of his new genitalia had been cranked up to a level that he was not remotely prepared for. The faintest brush of air across the newly reshaped skin sent a jolt through him that made his knees buckle and forced him to grab the bedpost for balance. Within seconds, Noah was then fully hard with an arousal that felt qualitatively different from anything he’d experienced before: sharper, more focused, and operating on a cleaner frequency that seemed to bypass all of the anxious mental noise that Noah usually had to fight through to be fully present during sex. Okay. I get it. Smaller but significantly more powerful. That’s… that’s honestly not a bad trade.
After taking a moment to calm down and get his boner back to a semi-firm status, Noah watched as the suit then began to draw up over his midsection. This was the area he had been the most anxious about, because this was where the greatest amount of work needed to be done to remold him into Shane Hollander’s shape. He was a little thicker around the middle than he would have liked and that was putting it charitably; the truth was that his stomach was the first thing he noticed every time he caught his reflection and the last thing he wanted anyone else to notice, so the idea of some high-tech bodysuit having to essentially negotiate with his belly fat felt both humiliating and hilarious in equal measure.
Yet despite its host’s reservations, the suit didn't hesitate or struggle. It just worked, the wet heat flaring to an intensity that made him double over and brace his hands on his knees as his midsection was compressed with the kind of force that you didn't negotiate with. He could feel his midsection being comprehensively reworked: fat deposits dissolving, muscle tightening, and his waist drawing in as the suit imposed its own specifications on a region that had never once been described as athletic. When the wave of heat finally subsided and Noah straightened up and looked down at himself, he literally said “you have got to be kidding me” out loud. He had abs – actual, visible, defined abs that he could see and feel beneath the smooth warm skin of his new torso. He ran his hand across them in open-mouthed disbelief, pressing his fingers into the grooves between each one, and then did it again because the first time hadn’t fully convinced him that they were real. But he soon realized they were – he had a flat, lean stomach with visible abdominal definition and he’d acquired it in approximately forty-five seconds. If the gym industry ever finds out about this, the entire economy is going to collapse…
The suit then continued upward across his chest, shoulders, and arms with the same relentless efficiency. His previously unremarkable and flabby chest compressed into something firmer and more defined, not bulky but proportioned with the lean athleticism of a hockey player’s build, while his arms shed their softness and gained a wiry, functional musculature that he could feel even before he saw it. His hands were the last thing to change and they were perhaps the strangest to experience because he could watch them transform in front of his face in real time: his broad, stubby fingers narrowing and lengthening, the knuckles refining, and the palms losing their width and gaining a dexterous elegance that made them look like they belonged to someone whose fine motor skills were a professional asset rather than a casual afterthought. When the reshaping finished, he held both hands up in front of him and turned them back and forth to analyze. As he wiggled the fingers individually, each one responded with a precision and independence that he had simply never experienced. These were hands that could do things - impressive, Olympic metal worthy things.
At this point, there was only one step left before Noah was fully Shane Hollander – the head. As he reached out towards the deflated face that hung limply around his neck, an intense buzz of excitement rushed through him as he watched his newly elegant hands cup his future visage. Due to this, there was no real sense of worry or dread as he ultimately smiled and went to pull the suit’s head up and over his own. Underneath the suit, he was consumed in complete darkness and could only feel the surreal sensation of pressure as his face was remade. The man could feel his jaw refining, his cheekbones sharpening, and lips settling into a neutral expression that was harder to read than anything Noah's perpetually anxious face had ever produced.
When Noah opened his eyes and looked in a nearby mirror, Shane Hollander looked back at him. Not an approximation or a “pretty close” lookalike, it was a pixel-perfect and terrifyingly convincing version of the Canadian hockey star standing in Noah’s bedroom wearing absolutely nothing and staring at his own freckled reflection with an expression of undisguised shock. The face was perfect: those dark, intense eyes beneath strong brows, the angular jaw, the straight nose, the mouth that always looked like it was about one provocation away from either a kiss or fistfight on the ice. He opened his mouth to say something, but what came out was not his voice. It was lower and quieter, carrying the measured Canadian cadence that Noah had heard in his countless viewings of the show. The shock of hearing it originate from his own throat made him take a physical step backward.
“What the fuck,” he said, and then he immediately said it again just to hear it a second time because Shane Hollander saying “what the fuck” in his bedroom was possibly the most surreal thing that had ever happened in the history of surreal things happening. The voice was calm, controlled, and carried an authority that Noah’s own voice had never once possessed, so hearing himself speak in it was making his brain short-circuit in the most wonderful way possible. He tried a few more words, testing the range: “Hi, I’m Shane. Good game tonight. Thanks.” Each one landed in that same quiet, self-possessed register and Noah could feel a delighted, slightly unhinged grin spreading across his new face.
He leaned closer to the mirror and studied the grin – ultimately realizing that it looked wrong on Shane’s features, too wide and too goofy and entirely too Noah. As such, he spent a moment schooling the expression until Shane Hollander’s resting face settled into place. God. The neutral expression was devastating, all quiet intensity and carefully contained emotion, and Noah found himself staring at it with the open appreciation of someone admiring a really excellent piece of art. He tried a smirk and it looked infuriatingly good. He tried a glare and it was genuinely intimidating. He raised one eyebrow and the effect was so perfectly dry and sardonic that he actually pointed at his own reflection and whispered, “You beautiful bastard.”
The rest of his body commanded his attention next because there was simply no ignoring it. Noah had spent years quietly admiring athletic physiques from a safe distance and now he was inside one and the experience was nothing short of extraordinary. He turned slowly in front of the mirror, taking in every angle with the wide-eyed reverence of a kid who’d just been handed the keys to a sports car. The shoulders were proportioned beautifully, not overly broad but defined and capable-looking, tapering down to that lean waist and those abs that he still couldn’t believe were his – even if temporarily. His chest had a firmness and a shape to it that made him want to just stand there and breathe, watching it rise and fall, because even the simple act of breathing looked different on this body. He flexed his right arm and watched the bicep respond with a clean, defined contraction that was so satisfying he flexed it three more times in rapid succession. He turned sideways and looked at his profile and almost laughed at how flat his stomach was, running his palm across it again because the tactile confirmation was somehow even more convincing than the visual. He twisted to check out his back, where he found that the split seam along the spine had completely sealed itself up and gave no indication that Noah was wearing a bodysuit. With that in mind, the man smiled and decided to admire the lean muscle definition across his shoulder blades, which made him let out a low, appreciative whistle.
Turning back to face the mirror, his gaze drifted downward and he spent a long moment simply looking at what the suit had given him between his legs, turning his hips slightly to see it from different angles and running a tentative thumb across the head just to confirm that the sensitivity was as dramatic as it had initially seemed. It absolutely was, and the resulting shudder that ran through his entire body was enough to make him pull his hand away with a breathless laugh and a muttered “okay, gotta save that for later” that sounded hilariously composed in Shane’s voice. His thighs were works of art, taut and sculpted with the unmistakable build of a skater, and even his feet looked better, longer and more elegant with a natural arch that his own flat feet had never managed. He did a slow squat, just to feel how the muscles engaged, and the controlled power of it made him feel like some kind of finely tuned machine. Then he straightened up, planted his hands on his hips, and took in the full picture one more time: Shane Hollander, naked and standing in his bedroom, looking back at him with dark eyes that were currently expressing a level of self-satisfaction that the real Shane would probably never allow himself.
“John is going to lose his entire mind,” Noah murmured, and the quiet confidence with which Shane’s voice delivered that statement made it sound less like a hope and more like a certainty.
He was still admiring the way Shane’s forearms looked when they were crossed over his chest (extremely good, for the record) when the mental bleed began. It started subtly, with biographical information settling into his consciousness with the unremarkable ease of things he was simply remembering rather than learning for the first time. He was Shane Hollander, born May 10th, 1991, in Ottawa to parents David and Yuna. He was an only child who’d been identified as gifted on the ice at six years old and had never been permitted to be ordinary after that. The details accumulated steadily: his childhood phone number, his blood type, the name of the family dog, the street he grew up on, the weight of his father’s hand on his shoulder after his first competitive game. He knew about the media training that had started when he was sixteen, the systematic process of learning to say nothing in complete sentences, and the art of maintaining eye contact with a reporter while revealing absolutely zero of what was happening behind his eyes. He knew the loneliness of being Canada’s golden boy, the exhausting performance of normalcy that was required of someone who had been public property since before he was old enough to vote.
The sensory layer of his memories came next and it hit with a vividness that made Noah sway on his feet. He could suddenly recall cold arena air in the back of his throat at five in the morning, that unique chemical-and-metal smell that anyone who’d spent time in rinks would recognize. There was the sound of blades on fresh ice, that satisfying scritch-scritch of first contact giving way to the long smooth hiss of a proper stride. He could recall the feel of a hockey stick in his hands that his brain recognized not as an object but as a part of himself, as natural and as integrated as his own fingers. He could feel the phantom weight of it, the grip of tape against his palms, the specific torque of a wrist shot released at the perfect angle.
Then a sudden wave of emotions crashed into him, done in a way that was neither gradual or gentle. Ilya. The name alone was enough to lock his hands around the edge of the dresser and make every muscle in his new body go taut. What followed was not a memory but a flood, eight years of compressed footage pouring through his nervous system so fast that for several seconds the room actually disappeared and all that existed was the feeling. There were so many hotel rooms in cities he stopped bothering to remember the names of, the concern for locked doors and closed curtains always on the top of mind along with the way the silence between them was so thick with unsaid things that it was practically solid. Of course, then there was the devastating contradiction of Ilya Rozanov: the brash, performing public version and the impossibly gentle private one, those hands that could throw punches but then also trace the line of Shane’s jaw with a tenderness that made the Canadian want to stop breathing so the moment wouldn’t end. In an instant, he could feel eight years of wanting something so completely and so constantly that the wanting had become part of his foundation, as essential to his structural integrity as bone.
When the flood receded enough for Noah to see the room again, something fundamental had shifted inside of him. The anxiety that had been the background hum of his entire life was simply absent, replaced by a composure so complete that the world felt like it had been turned down from a ten to a comfortable four. His posture had also changed without him noticing, becoming straighter, stiller, and more contained. He looked at his reflection and held his own gaze without flinching, which was something that Noah had literally never been able to do for more than a few seconds without wanting to crawl out of his skin. For the first time, eye contact felt easy and natural. It was like this was simply how a person was supposed to exist in the world and Noah had just been doing it wrong for twenty-eight years. So this is what it’s like, he thought, quieter and more concise than any thought Noah had ever had. This is what it’s like when your brain isn’t constantly trying to eat you alive.
Now fully Shane Hollander in both body and mind, the man looked down at himself and felt a strange twinge of discomfort about being in the nude. Not one to enjoy exhibitionism, being naked was only something that Shane did when it was time to either shower or have sex. Given the fact that neither of those things were happening right now, he felt a compulsion in his mind to remedy his nudity.
As such, the new hockey player worked with haste to cover himself up – opting for a pair of his joggers and a t-shirt, both of which fit differently enough to serve as yet another reminder that the body underneath them was not the one they’d been purchased for. The joggers were loose around the thighs and the shirt hung differently across his shoulders and gaped at the waist, and Noah caught himself adjusting the hem with a precise, particular motion that felt more like Shane than like himself. He checked that the Ilya box on the bed was positioned neatly, tag facing the door, and then headed out to the living room to wait for his lover’s return.
Sitting on the couch and waiting for John with Shane Hollander’s composure was a profoundly different experience from sitting on the couch and waiting for John with Noah’s anxiety. There was no bouncing knee, no compulsive phone-checking, no running through worst-case scenarios on a loop. There was just patience, the quiet awareness of his own breathing, and a low persistent ache behind his sternum that he was beginning to understand was what Shane carried around all the time: the constant, heavy, and undying want for Ilya. Even knowing that it was John who was about to walk through that door and not Ilya, the ache responded to the anticipation due to the fact that the other man was someone who Shane hoped would wear the Russian player. For a moment, those fantasies of getting John to put the suit on rushed through his mind as the minutes ticked by. Eventually though, the lock turned and every nerve in the Asian-Canadian’s body lit up.
"Babe, they were completely out of your favorite chicken tenders, so I got the weird store-brand kind. If it sucks, don’t get mad at–"
Out of nowhere, John appeared around the corner with a grocery bag in each hand and a sentence that never reached its conclusion. He saw Shane and stopped dead, where for a long, unnerving moment, the only sound in the apartment being the hum of the refrigerator. John’s eyes went wide and did a rapid lap from Shane’s face to the joggers to the bare feet to the face again, and Noah could see the exact sequence of emotions passing across his boyfriend’s features in real time: confusion, alarm, a brief flash of something that looked like territorial anger, and then just raw, uncomprehending shock.
“Hey,” Noah said quickly, before John could spiral any further into whatever nightmare scenario was assembling itself in his head. The voice that came out was Shane’s and Noah could see that this did not help the situation at all, so he dug down beneath the composure and found the part of himself that was still fundamentally Noah, the warmth and the anxious sweetness and the slightly bumbling earnestness that John had fallen in love with eight years ago. “It’s me, babe. It’s Noah. I know I look different right now, but I promise you it’s me and I’m going to explain everything.”
John set the grocery bags down on the floor with the exaggerated thud of someone whose hands were trembling yet hadn’t noticed. “You have about thirty seconds before I call the police,” he said in a voice that was admirably steady for a man who had just walked into his apartment to find Hudson Williams sitting on his couch in his boyfriend’s sweatpants.
“Your middle name is Gideon, you’re terrified of spiders because one landed on your face when you were four, and last Thursday, you told me that Connor Storrie could, and I’m quoting directly, rearrange your guts.” Noah delivered all three facts in Shane’s calm, measured voice and watched the colour drain from John’s face and then rush back in twice as strong as the third detail landed. “See? It’s me. Only I would know that stuff. Well, me and our neighbors probably, because you were not quiet when you said it…”
John opened his mouth and then closed it again, before opening it for a second time. “How,” was all that came out.
“So I found this website,” Noah began, shifting forward on the couch and resting his elbows on his knees in a posture that was more Shane than Noah but felt completely natural. “They make these insanely detailed bodysuits based on characters from TV and stuff. You put one on and you get the whole package: the body, the voice, the memories, the personality, everything. I ordered two of them, one Shane and one Ilya, because I thought–” He paused, not because the words wouldn’t come but because the honest version of them felt vulnerable in a way that even Shane’s composure couldn’t fully armour him against. “I thought it might be something fun for us. Something different. I know things have been a little… routine lately, and I’m not saying that’s bad because I love our life, but I missed the feeling of, you know…” He gestured vaguely between them. “The spark. That period where we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. Since we watched these two characters on screen who have that in spades, I thought, what if we could actually feel that? Even just for one night?”
John was quiet for a long time, his arms folded across his chest and his expression cycling through about fifteen different emotions that Noah could identify and several more that he couldn’t. “So you’re in there,” he said finally, studying Shane’s face with an intensity that Noah could feel on his skin. “You’re actually in there. Under all of–” He gestured at Shane’s everything. “This.”
“I’m right here,” Noah confirmed, and he let the warmth come through in Shane’s voice, the part that was unmistakably him. “I’ve just got significantly better cheekbones and a working knowledge of Canadian hockey history. Also, John, I have abs. I need you to understand that I have actual abs right now. Isn’t that fucking wild?!”
The corner of John’s mouth twitched. It was small but it was there, so Noah clung to it like a lifeline because that twitch meant that John’s sense of humour was waking back up. Given how well he knew his partner, Noah knew that once John’s sense of humour was engaged, the battle was half won. “So… you bought a bodysuit of a fictional hockey player so you could finally have abs?” John asked slowly.
“The abs are a bonus. I bought them because I love you and because our sex life could use some rocket fuel. That’s why there’s an Ilya Rozanov suit on our bed waiting for you right now. I would very much like you to at least consider trying it on…” Noah stood up from the couch and closed the distance between them, stopping a couple of feet away. At this point, Noah finally got to recognize a newfound height difference because Shane had two inches over John, which now meant that he was looking down at his boyfriend. He could feel Shane’s memories pulling at him, that bone-deep ache for Ilya surging forward in response to the closeness, and he let it show on his face because hiding it was currently beyond his capabilities and also because he didn’t want to hide it. He wanted John to see what this felt like.
“I can’t stop looking at you right now,” Noah said, his voice growing rougher than Shane’s because his composure was finally beginning to come apart at the seams. “I’ve never been able to just look at someone like this, John. My brain always tells me to look away and right now it’s not telling me that and all I want to do is stand here and look at you. That’s what this suit does. That’s what it feels like to be Shane Hollander.” He swallowed. “Imagine what it would feel like to be Ilya. Imagine having that voice… that body… eight years’ worth of wanting someone standing right in front of you. Imagine looking at me the way Ilya looks at Shane.”
John’s breathing then changed. Noah could see it, the rise and fall of his chest quickening, the defensive posture softening as his arms slowly uncrossed. His eyes were moving across Shane’s face with a different quality now, less like a man assessing a threat and more like a man allowing himself, for the first time, to actually take in what he was seeing. “You’re actually serious about this,” John said, and it wasn’t a question.
“I have never been more serious about anything in my life.”
John stared at him for another few seconds and then let out a long, slow breath that seemed to carry the last of his resistance out with it. “You’re completely crazy,” he said, but his voice had gone soft in a way that Noah recognized immediately because it was the same voice John used when he was about to agree to something that he was going to pretend he’d been talked into but had actually wanted all along.
“Absolutely certifiable,” Noah agreed.
“And you bought two of these because you thought it would be romantic?”
“Romantic, sexy, and potentially transformative for our relationship, yes.”
John’s hand came up and touched the side of Shane’s face, the contact sending a visible shudder through Noah’s entire body. He didn’t know it, but his body interpreted the touch through the lens of eight years of Ilya, making the resulting sensation so intense that it nearly took his legs out from under him. John must have seen the reaction because his eyes widened slightly and his thumb moved across Shane’s cheekbone with a curiosity that was rapidly displacing the last traces of hesitation.
“Alright, show me the suit,” John said quietly. “The Ilya one.”
Noah’s heart, or rather Shane’s heart, slammed against his ribs so hard that he was fairly sure John could feel it through the hand still on his face. He took John’s hand and turned towards the bedroom, his excitement soaring as eight years of Shane Hollander’s accumulated longing recognized that it was about to get what it had always wanted.
The Ilya box was right where he’d left it, neat and precise on the centre of the bed, tag facing the door. John made his way into the bedroom and looked at the box before peering back to look at Noah. The man closed his eyes, the last of his resistance collapsing inward like a condemned building accepting gravity.
"One time," John said, his voice getting slightly hoarse. "One time, and if it's weird, I'm taking it off immediately."
"One time," Noah confirmed, already grinning while reaching for John's hand.
"God, I’m already regretting this," John retorted, but his hand only tightened further around Noah's instead of letting go.
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