Archive of Our Own

The waiting room has a small waterfall feature on the far wall. Shane has been looking at it for eleven minutes. It is the kind of thing someone put there deliberately — the sound of moving water, the idea of calm — and it is making him want to leave.

He doesn't relax on cue. He never has. The outward indicators of a soothing environment register in him as instruction rather than invitation, and instructions he has not asked for make him contrary in a way he would not call contrary if you asked him. He would call it discernment. He would say: I know what works for me.

He doesn't leave. He straightens slightly and looks at the door instead, which is plain and wooden and has nothing to say about him.

He arrived eight minutes early, which is what he does. He timed the drive the day before. He noted the parking. He identified the entrance. He does not arrive unprepared to unfamiliar environments — not on the road, not in new cities, not in arenas he has never played, and not here, in this beige waiting room with its waterfall and its closed wooden door.

He has the language ready: modified macrobiotic, intentional, performance-based. He knows how this appointment goes. He has run through it already — the shape of the conversation, the likely terrain. He is here because he is a professional, and professionals address things when they become inefficiencies.

This is what he says to himself. He is very good at this.

He is so good at it that he almost doesn't notice the thing sitting underneath it. The thing that has been there since he made the appointment six days ago, since he sat in his car outside a Tim Hortons in Montreal and found the number on his phone and pressed call before he could stop himself. He immediately reframed it as professionalism, as due diligence, as the appropriate response of a person who takes his career seriously. He has not looked at it directly since.

He does not look at it now. The waterfall makes its sound. Shane looks at the door.

Ilya was watching a replay the first time he said anything about his name.

His Boston apartment, spring fighting to emerge just after All-Stars, and the two of them had found a balance that felt provisional to Shane — like a space he'd been granted access to but hadn't been told how long and didn't want to ask in case asking made it shorter. They were not together, technically. They were — Shane had not yet found a word for what they were, and he had stopped looking for one somewhere around February. Looking meant deciding. Deciding meant it was real. Real meant something could go wrong with it. He had decided that not deciding was a form of protection. He had not yet understood that protection was not the same as safety.

It was the fourth time Shane had been in this apartment. He had kept count without deciding to. The first time was December, ostensibly to watch tape on a shared opponent, which had lasted approximately forty minutes before something else had happened that Shane also did not have a word for. The second time was February. The third time was early last year. When Shane had fled. And ruined it; ruined him; hurt both of them so deeply that Shane wasn’t really sure why Ilya hadn’t blocked him.

The fourth time was now. The first time since they decided that there was something more between them, the season loomed over both of them, and the upcoming summer a thing they had not discussed, and which hung in the apartment the way things hung when two people were both aware of something and neither of them was saying it.

Ilya's apartment was the kind of place that reflected nothing back at you and then suddenly did. The furniture was expensive and impersonal, hotel-quality, the apartment of a man who had learned early that most places were temporary. But there was a shelf of Russian books Shane had asked about once and gotten a half-hour explanation for. There were two photographs in the hallway Shane had not yet worked up to asking about. There was a specific mug that Ilya used for tea and would not use for anything else, which Shane had discovered by accident when he'd made tea once in the wrong mug and Ilya had said nothing but had also, visibly, said something. You had to stay long enough to find these things.

Shane had been staying long enough.

He was on the couch. Ilya was on the other end of it, which was close enough that their legs were almost touching and not touching, the specific proximity of a situation that had not been named. The television was on — a replay from earlier in the season, some game neither of them had played in. Ilya was watching it with the focused attention he gave most things, which was not the same as the focused attention he gave hockey. For hockey the attention was complete and apparently effortless. For other things it was deliberate, chosen, a man who had decided this was worth his regard.

Shane had been scrolling through his phone without reading anything. This was a thing he did when he was in a room with Ilya and didn't want to appear to be paying as much attention as he was paying. He was paying a great deal of attention. He was cataloguing things — the way Ilya held his beer, the way he occasionally exhaled sharply at something happening on the screen, the fact that his socks did not match, which was either carelessness or a specific kind of comfort and Shane had not yet determined which. He was doing this quietly, building a private archive of Ilya Rozanov in an unguarded moment, because these were rare and because Shane understood, without having said it to himself, that he wanted to remember them.

"I am going to call that man out on Twitter and ruin his life," Ilya said, at the television.

Shane looked up from his phone. "Who?"

"This announcer." Ilya pointed with his beer, not looking away from the screen. "He is the only one who even tries the full thing. Every other one gives up — Rozanov, Roz, fuck Rozy fine, I accept this. But this one—" He stopped. On the screen, audible despite the low volume, the announcer said something with a long mangled vowel in it. Ilya made a sound like he'd bitten something sour. "Eeel-ee-uuhh. Every single time. Like nails on a chalkboard."

Shane listened. He had been watching Ilya Rozanov play hockey for nearly a decade — had played against him, watched his tape, heard his name said in briefings and post-game comments and by commentators in seventeen different accents. He had never once thought about it. He had been saying Ilya the way everyone said it. The approximation. The version that was close enough.

I have been saying this wrong.

The thought arrived before he'd decided to have it. He sat with it for a moment, turning it over. Years. Every time he'd said the name in a game context, in locker room conversation, in his own head, to the press. The approximation, filed away as correct because no one had said otherwise, because it was close enough, because close enough was the standard and he had accepted it.

"Do I—" Shane started.

Ilya glanced at him.

"Do I do that," Shane said. "Say your name wrong."

Ilya looked at him for a moment. His expression did the thing it sometimes did, the thought present and then gone. "You are fine," he said. "You are close."

"Close."

"Close enough." He turned back to the television.

Something shifted in Shane's chest. Close enough was not the same as right. Close enough meant Ilya had been hearing a version of his own name from Shane's mouth and deciding not to say anything about it. Had decided, at some point, that Shane was not someone to correct. Had accepted the approximation. Shane did not know when this had been decided or how long it had been in place or whether Ilya had even made it consciously — it might just be the thing Ilya did with most people, let the mispronunciation pass, let the English mouths make what they made of it. Most people didn't notice and didn't ask.

Shane was noticing. Shane was asking.

"That's not good enough," Shane said.

"It's fine—"

"It's your name." Not anger. Something else — the feeling he got when he made an error in a game and recognized it and needed to go back before anything else. The small urgency of a thing that shouldn't be wrong. "Show me. How is it supposed to sound."

Ilya looked at him for a longer moment. Shane couldn't read the whole of his expression, only the part that wasn't quite amusement — something behind it, watching Shane with a specificity that always made him feel slightly examined, slightly known, as though Ilya was cataloguing things too and Shane had just given him something to file. He muted the television.

"Give me your hand," he said.

Shane gave him his hand. Ilya took it — not reaching, just receiving, the easy confidence of a man who asks for things and expects them — and placed it, open-palmed, against his own throat. Warm skin. The slight roughness of a day's stubble at the edge of Shane's palm. Shane could feel Ilya's pulse, slow and steady, and the particular warmth of a throat, which was different from the warmth of a hand or an arm, which was closer.

"Il-yuh," he said.

Shane felt it before he understood it. Two syllables, compact, the vowels sitting close together where Shane had been spreading them. No third syllable where he had been putting one. The sound vibrating against his palm, against the pads of his fingers, Ilya's voice in Ilya's throat and Shane's hand there to receive it.

"Il-yuh," Shane said.

Ilya's throat moved under his palm. Something shifted very small in his face — the thing behind the amusement, surfacing briefly, there and then managed back. "Yes," he said. "Like that."

Shane said it again. He was not entirely sure, by this point, who he was doing this for. The third time, the name felt different in his mouth — not foreign exactly, but more precise than it had been, more itself. Ilya's pulse at the edge of his hand, steady. The summer light through the west-facing windows, the particular gold of early evening in Boston, the kind of light that makes ordinary rooms look like something is happening in them.

The television was muted. The game moved without sound.

He kept his hand where it was. Ilya let him. Neither of them said anything else for a while, and Shane noticed, sitting there, that he had not thought about anything else in several minutes. Not the season just finished, not the season coming, not the careful arithmetic of what they were or were not. Just the name in his mouth, Ilya's pulse under his hand, the summer light doing what it did.

Not with this, he thought. Not with him.

He wasn't sure whether he meant the name or everything else, the whole unnamed accumulating thing, the four visits and the archive he was building and the word he kept not finding. He wasn't sure it mattered which one he meant. They felt, sitting there with his palm against Ilya's throat, like the same decision.

He moved his thumb, barely, against Ilya's pulse point. Ilya didn't move.

He was learning to let things be enough for now.

He was not sure yet if he was good at it. But he kept his hand where it was, and Ilya kept breathing under it, and outside the Boston summer did what it did, and Shane stayed.

"Tell me why you're here today."

The therapist's name is Dr. Okonkwo. She has a small plant on the windowsill, and a clock Shane can't read without making it obvious he's trying. Her face gives him very little to work with. It listens without commenting, receives without reacting. He is good at faces. He uses them as information. This one is not offering him any.

"I was referred," Shane lies. "By my team physician. There's a standard — it's a fairly routine referral for athletes when there are—"

"I have the referral notes." She has them in a folder she has not looked at since he sat down. "I'm asking you."

Shane stops. "There are some concerns," he says. "About my diet. My eating habits. Which I'm here to address."

"Okay." She writes something. A fountain pen, he notices. Not a ballpoint. "Can you tell me more about that?"

He can. He has the language and he uses it — the modified macrobiotic framework, the intention behind it, the way it interfaces with his performance load, the modifications he's made from the stricter version, the fish, the reasoning. He has explained this before, to team nutritionists, to trainers, to the occasional teammate who asked. He knows how to make it sound considered. Researched. Adult. He tells her about the framework, and he can hear, as he speaks, that it sounds exactly like what it is: a person who has thought carefully about what they put in their body and arrived at an informed and deliberate position.

She writes something. Her face gives him nothing.

"And you feel this is serving you well," she says. Not quite a question.

"I feel it's working for me, yes."

This is true. He believes this. He has believed it for years, which is not the same as it having always been true, but it is indistinguishable from the inside.

"Okay." She turns to a fresh page. "I want to ask some background questions before we continue. Standard intake."

"Of course."

She asks about his hockey career, his current team, his living situation, his support systems. He answers clearly. She asks about stressors. He talks about the season, travel, the usual pressures of the job — the things that are real, that he is willing to give her. She asks about his sleep. Fine, he says. She asks whether he's sought therapy before. No, he says.

He is doing well. He can feel it — the session moving through its terrain the way he expected it to, his answers landing cleanly, nothing catching. This is what he came for. An appointment he attended. A professional he spoke to honestly and at length. He is going to be able to say: I went. I did the thing.

She asks whether he is in a relationship.

"I'm—" Shane says.

He is in the middle of preparing the answer — I keep that relatively private, something that forecloses the line without sounding defensive — and then, without his permission, from somewhere between his brain and his mouth, the sentence changes.

"My boyfriend," he says, "is—"

The room becomes a specific kind of quiet.

Shane hears it the way you sometimes hear yourself speak, the words arriving a half-second after they've left you, and in that half-second he understands exactly what he has said and his whole body responds to it at once. The heat in his face. The thing his chest does, a clenching that is not quite panic and is exactly panic. His hands, which have been relaxed in his lap, are no longer relaxed.

He has been managing this information for years. In every locker room he has ever been in. In every interview, every team dinner, every conversation with a reporter who asks about his personal life and gets I keep that private in a tone that ends the line of inquiry. He has been doing this for so long it has stopped feeling like management and started feeling like just — how things are. He walks into rooms and knows what version of himself to be in them. He has never slipped. He has never had the sentence change on him without his permission.

He slipped. In this room. In a room he chose to come to.

"I shouldn't have fucking said that," he says.

Dr. Okonkwo does not react. Her face is still doing nothing. He would very much like to put his hands over his eyes. He does not put his hands over his eyes.

"I mean—" He stops. He sounds like someone trying to unsay something in front of an audience of one. The audience of one is writing things down. "I didn't mean — that's not — I misspoke—"

"You don't have to clarify anything," she says.

"This is a confidential appointment." He can hear himself. He sounds like someone making a legal argument, which is not what he means, which is exactly what he means, which is the only thing he can think to do right now because the alternative is just sitting here in the heat in his face. "Patient-physician confidentiality covers—"

"It does," she says. "Everything that happens in this room stays in this room, unless you disclose harm to yourself or others."

"I know that." He knows that. He knew that before he made the appointment. He is aware, sitting here, that knowing and believing are not the same thing. "But you could—" He stops. He is trying to be precise, because imprecision right now is its own vulnerability, and he has already produced enough of those in the last thirty seconds to last him a long time. "What I just said. There are publications that would pay significantly for that information. It's the kind of thing that—"

"Okay," she says. She does not look offended. She does not look anything in particular. "So what if I did."

Shane blinks. "What?"

"What happens then. Walk me through it."

He stares at her. She is watching him with the same unhurried neutrality, pen resting against the folder. She is actually asking. She wants the logic followed.

He follows the logic. He has always been better at problems with concrete outcomes. It gives him somewhere to put his hands, in a manner of speaking.

"I'd sue," he says.

"Yes."

"I'd win."

"Almost certainly."

"You'd lose your license." He does the math. "Whatever you made from the publication, plus damages. Probably my legal fees."

"Probably my house," she says. "And my career. And my reputation, which took twenty years to build." She pauses. "I'm not saying this to reassure you. I'm saying the incentive structure doesn't work the way you're afraid it does. The risk for me is catastrophic. The upside is not."

Shane is quiet.

"I want to be clear," she says, "that — being gay isn't damaging or wrong. That's not how I'd put it. But I understand you're a public figure. And that hearing yourself say that when you did not intend to — that it felt like losing ground."

Shane is looking at the succulent. He has been looking at it for thirty seconds because it is easier than looking at her. She seems to understand this. She has not done anything to redirect him.

Losing ground. Not quite right and also exactly right. His mouth had produced the truest available word without consulting him first. My boyfriend. As though that were already settled.

He doesn't know when he decided. It seems possible that some things are simply true before you give them permission to be.

"Can we," Shane says. He clears his throat. "Can we continue with the other part. The reason I came in."

"Of course," she says.

She moves on. She asks the next question, something routine, and he answers it, and she does not return to what he said and does not require him to, and her moving on without requiring anything of him is the kindest thing anyone has done for him in a room in a long time. His throat does something. He spends the next several minutes not thinking about it.

He makes this drive often enough now that his body knows it without him — the 417 east in winter dark, the flat particular geography of eastern Ontario, Ottawa appearing eventually as a low smear of light on the horizon. He knows where the speed drops. He knows which radio station cuts out near the Bells Corners exit. He knows the specific quality of the dark out here, which is different from Montreal dark — flatter, less interrupted, the sky doing more of the work.

He has the radio on low. Something instrumental. He is not listening to it.

He is thinking about the conversation in Boston. Not about the name. After that.

Late in the season before last, Ilya's last year in Boston, the two of them in Ilya's kitchen at a table the right size for two people having a conversation. Shane had noticed that. He was always noticing things like that about Ilya's choices — the way they were precise without being deliberate, the way the apartment had become a place that fit the both of them without Ilya seeming to have tried. The table was dark wood. It had two chairs. It had been placed under the window, which faced west, which meant that in the evenings the light came through it at an angle that made everything look considered. Ilya had not considered it. He had simply put it there.

Ilya's contract was up at the end of that season. He had reconfirmed in October, briefly, without particular emphasis — contract is up at the end of the year, remember? — and then talked about something else. The something else had a shape by January. Rumors said Ilya could go anywhere. His pick. Eight years in Boston, one win. Ilya had built the team into contenders through his sweat, and blood, and tears, and the callouses on his palm. Shane knew that Ilya was the kind of player other teams had to plan around specifically.

Shane had thought about this for three months before he said anything. He had thought about it in the way he thought about things he was afraid of: at a distance, sideways, letting it sit in his peripheral vision while he paid attention to everything else.

One night in March, in Ilya's kitchen, at the table that fit two people, he looked at Ilya across a dinner Ilya had cooked and Shane had eaten less of than Ilya had noticed — he had watched Ilya notice and not say anything, had filed it away without opening it — and he said: I don't want you to do something you'll regret.

He had meant every layer of it. I don't want you to make a decision around me that you end up resenting. I know what you've built here. I'm afraid of being the reason. I'm afraid that if you come toward me and then one day decide it wasn't worth it, I will have been the thing that cost you Boston.

He hadn't said any of it. He said: I don't want you to do something you'll regret, and Ilya looked at him for a long moment — the look that revealed and then didn't — and said: I am not planning to.

Which meant: I know what I'm doing. Which meant: stop trying to give me an exit I'm not looking for.

Shane had understood this. He had also not been able to stop building the tally.

He does this. He has always done this — tracks the things people give up, or move, or adjust, on his behalf, and adds them to a running account he is not supposed to be keeping. His mother rescheduling things around his games when he was in juniors, never commenting on it. Hayden, early in Shane's career, taking the harder defensive assignments so Shane could focus on offense, never asking for credit. Ilya driving to Montreal for a single free day, because Shane had a thing he couldn't move and Ilya said I'll come to you without being asked. Ilya signing in Ottawa, thirty kilometers from the Quebec border, as close to Montreal as you can get while still being in a different province.

The tally is long. Shane has been keeping it for a long time.

He is afraid that one day Ilya will look up from what he's building and feel the weight of what he's put down for it. He is afraid that love is not protection against regret. He is afraid that being chosen does not mean being worth it — that those are two separate questions, and you don't always get to see the answer to the second before the first one has already cost something. He is afraid that Ilya will do the math one day and find Shane on the wrong side of it, and that by then there will be nothing Shane can do except watch it happen.

He is also afraid, in a quieter and more recent way, that the tally is the wrong tool entirely. That he has been using it to understand something it was not built to understand. That what Ilya does — the driving, the signing, the head in Shane's lap on a Tuesday — is not a cost being accumulated but something else. Something the tally has no category for.

He does not know what to do with that yet.

The 417 is flat in the winter around him. Ottawa's lights resolve in the distance, low and diffuse through the dark. Shane takes the exit he knows and finds the roads he knows. He does not stop being afraid. But he drives toward the lights anyway, which is the closest he usually gets.

She has moved back to the eating framework. This is the part of the session Shane is most prepared for.

"Tell me what a typical day looks like," Dr. Okonkwo says. "During the season. From the morning."

He tells her. He is good at this — clear, sequential, the logic of it visible. He wakes up, he assesses what the day requires, he eats accordingly. The assessment is fast, automatic, runs before he's fully awake. Road trips require more planning because hotel restaurants can't be relied on and room service menus are rarely workable, so he brings what he needs. He has a system for that too — a specific bag, specific items, the variables he's learned to account for over eight years of travel. Home stands are easier. He has a delivery service with a standing order. He explains the modifications he makes around game days versus practice days versus travel days, the way output determines input, the precision of it.

She listens. She writes something. Her expression does not change.

"And this has been consistent," she says. "The framework. You've maintained it across — different cities, different teams, different schedules."

"Yes," he says. "That's the point of a framework. It's stable. It doesn't depend on circumstances."

"Has anyone ever pushed back on it? A team nutritionist, a trainer?"

"I've had conversations with nutritionists," he says. "I've explained my approach. Generally, they're satisfied with my performance metrics."

This is true, technically. What he does not say is that he has learned, over eight years, how to present the framework to nutritionists in a way that closes down further inquiry. He knows which numbers to lead with. He knows how to frame the fish as sufficient protein. He has been doing this long enough that it has stopped feeling like management and started feeling like just having a conversation.

"And how long have you been doing this," she says. "This particular framework."

"Seven years," he says. "Eight, approximately."

"Since you entered the league."

"Around then, yes."

"What did you eat before that?"

Shane pauses. The question is simple and the answer should be simple and somehow it is not.

"Whatever was available," he says. "I was in juniors. You eat what the billet family makes, what the team provides."

"Did you enjoy it?"

He looks at the succulent. "I didn't think about it much."

"And now?"

"Now I think about it carefully," he says. "That's the point. That's what separates — most people don't think about it carefully. I do."

"Is that something you find satisfying?" she says. "The thinking about it carefully."

He opens his mouth and closes it.

The honest answer is: yes. There is something that functions like satisfaction in the precision of it — the way the framework accounts for every variable, the way it removes uncertainty, the way he can look at what he eats and know exactly what it does and why. It is not pleasurable the way food is supposed to be pleasurable. It is pleasurable the way a clean piece of analysis is pleasurable. The way knowing is pleasurable. The way walking into a room and having already solved the room is pleasurable.

He has never said this out loud to anyone.

"Yes," he says.

"What do you find satisfying about it?"

"It's — controlled," he says. "I know what I'm doing and why. There's no guesswork." He pauses. "In this job there's a lot of guesswork. Injuries, trades, roster decisions, whether a contract gets renewed. A lot of things I can't — that aren't mine to determine." He stops. "This is mine. I determine this."

Dr. Okonkwo writes something. "Does the control ever feel like work?" she says. "Like something you have to maintain?"

"Everything at this level is something you have to maintain," Shane says. "That's what competition is."

"That's not quite what I asked."

He looks at her. She is watching him with the same neutral expression, pen resting against the folder. Not challenging him. Just waiting to see if he's actually heard the question.

He has heard the question.

"Sometimes," he says. Carefully. "On the road it's — there's more variables. More things that can deviate. That requires more — attention."

"More stress?"

"More attention," he says again.

She writes something. "When something deviates," she says, "a substitution in a delivery, a restaurant that doesn't have what you need — what happens?"

"I adapt," he says.

"What does that feel like? The adapting."

He looks at his hands in his lap. He is thinking about the delivery that morning — the substitution he had been assessing when Ilya said can I ask you something. The specific quality of that assessment, which he has never tried to describe to anyone because there has never been a reason to.

"Like a problem that needs solving," he says. "I work out what the substitution changes, what I need to adjust elsewhere to account for it."

"And if you can't adjust? If the variables are too unpredictable?"

"That's what planning is for," he says. "You plan for contingencies."

"But if the contingency fails," she says. "If everything goes wrong — you're somewhere you didn't expect, the food you brought isn't enough, the restaurant can't accommodate. What then?"

Shane is quiet for a moment.

The honest answer is that this doesn't often happen because he plans carefully enough to prevent it. The honest answer is also that on the occasions when it has happened — a flight delay, a city he didn't prepare for well enough, a team meal that had nothing he could work with — there is a quality to that experience that he has never described and has categorized as stress about logistics. The stress about logistics that is, now that someone is asking him to describe it, somewhat larger than logistics seem to warrant.

"Then I manage," he says.

She writes something. She doesn't push. She moves to the next question, something else, something he can answer cleanly, and the session continues forward.

He is still winning. He tells himself this.

But more than the situation warrants is sitting in the back of his head, a phrase that arrived earlier in the session in his own voice, and he has not been able to put it all the way down since he said it.

He is in Ottawa in November when Ilya gets sick.

It goes through the team fast — one player down Tuesday, three Wednesday, half the Centaurs texting into the group chat that Ilya complains to him about. By Thursday, with varying degrees of drama about their symptoms, the messages ranging from terse (not coming in) to operatic (Boodram sending a full paragraph about his sinuses). Ilya holds out until Saturday. Shane shows up mid-afternoon because Ilya hasn't texted in fourteen hours, which is anomalous, and finds him curled up on the couch in the living room looking at the ceiling with an expression that suggests personal betrayal by his own immune system.

"I'm fine," Ilya says.

"You look terrible."

"I'm fine and I look terrible and I feel terrible. These are three separate facts." He doesn't move. He is wearing a shirt Shane recognizes as Ilya's sick-clothes — still a shirt that costs more than it should, but marginally softer than usual, with a small imperfection near the collar that Ilya would not wear in public. There is a blanket pulled to his waist that he has clearly been under all day. The curtains are half-drawn. The house is stuffy and has the specific quality of a place that has been very quiet for a long time.

"Have you eaten anything today?"

"Tea."

"Tea is not—" Shane stops. He is aware of the word food collecting in his mouth and puts it somewhere else. "Okay," he says. "Let me make you tea."

The kitchen is tidy in the particular way of a kitchen where one person has been careful about it — Ilya's version of careful, which means things are where they belong and the counter is clear but there is a mug already in the drying rack and a spoon on the counter that he has washed and not put away yet. Shane finds the jar of strawberry jam on the second shelf of the fridge, the black tea in the cabinet above the kettle, the mug that is Ilya's mug and not the other mugs. He makes the tea correctly — the jam stirred in until it dissolves, strong, the specific temperature Ilya prefers which Shane has calibrated by observation over several months without being asked to. He brings it out with crackers and sits on the far end of the couch.

He isn't sure what Ilya wants. Ilya does not always want to be tended to. There is a version of Ilya who accepts care easily and a version who needs to not notice he's receiving it, and sick-Ilya is a data point Shane does not yet have enough of. He sits at the far end and waits.

Ilya reaches out and takes the mug without sitting up. Holds it against his chest with both hands and closes his eyes. The steam rises. He says something in Russian that sounds like either thank you or this will do, and Shane has learned enough to know those two things are not always distinguishable from each other, and also that both of them are, in their way, the same.

Shane sits on the far end of the couch. He has his phone. He doesn't look at it.

The house settles around them. Outside the November Ottawa afternoon is doing what November Ottawa afternoons do, which is be grey and particular and faintly grudging about the whole enterprise of being a day. Inside the lamp on the side table is on and the television is off and the only sound is the radiator occasionally making its sound, which Shane has also learned.

Several minutes later, Ilya sets the mug on the coffee table and shifts on the couch and then keeps shifting until he is lying down with his head on Shane's thigh.

Shane goes still.

Ilya pulls the couch blanket up to his shoulder. His eyes are already closing. His hand comes to rest near Shane's knee, not quite touching, the fingers loose and open in the specific way of a hand that has stopped holding anything on purpose, and his breathing begins almost immediately to even out — not all the way to sleep, not yet, but the loosening of it, the particular quality of a body releasing the effort of being upright.

Outside, the grey afternoon. The radiator. Shane is aware of his own heartbeat.

The weight of Ilya's head against his leg. The warmth of him through the fabric, more warmth than usual — fever-warm, the particular heat of a body working hard at something invisible. Ilya has arranged himself here without asking, without ceremony, with the total unselfconsciousness of a person who has decided where they want to be and simply gone there. No performance of needing. No management of what it looks like to need. Just the decision, made by Ilya's body before Ilya's brain had fully signed off on it.

Shane puts his hand, carefully, on the back of Ilya's head. Fingers against warm hair, the curve of his skull beneath it. Ilya makes a small sound that is not quite a word — the sound of someone settling, of a body recognizing that it is where it wants to be — and does not move away.

The television is on with the sound down. One of the Saturday games, teams Shane tracks peripherally. He doesn't watch it.

He sits in the lamplight of Ilya's house — the house that is becoming Ilya's house, slowly, one moved object at a time — and he thinks about the tally. Whether this goes on it, or whether the tally was ever the right way to understand what Ilya is doing. Sitting here with Ilya's weight in his lap and the November afternoon going quiet around them, the framework feels beside the point. Like reading the weather report while it's raining on you.

Ilya's breathing evens out all the way. Asleep, or close enough. His hand near Shane's knee, not quite touching, fingers still loose.

Shane stays. His hand moves, barely, in Ilya's hair. He lets the afternoon go.

"When was the last time," Dr. Okonkwo says, "that you didn't feel stressed about eating?"

She has put the folder aside. Her pen is down. There is a different quality to her attention now.

Shane opens his mouth.

He has an answer ready. He always has an answer ready — and the answer is that he doesn't feel stressed about eating, that stress implies conflict and there is no conflict, that the framework is not a source of anxiety but the opposite of one. Structure is not stress. Knowing exactly what goes into your body is not stress. Stress is not knowing. Stress is the teammates who eat whatever appears in front of them and wonder why their recovery is inconsistent, why their energy craters in the third period, why they feel thirty-five at twenty-eight. He is twenty-six and he does not feel thirty-five. He knows exactly why.

He opens his mouth to say some version of this.

The answer is not there.

He goes looking for it.

He goes back through the last month. Road trips, home stands, the maintenance of performance across all of it — the particular vigilance of the road, restaurant menus assessed before he orders, the mental note when a hotel breakfast doesn't have what he needs, the adjustment made automatically before he's fully conscious of making it. Back to September, training camp. The summer. He is looking for a specific thing: a meal that didn't require this. A time the question of food was not, underneath everything else, a question.

He goes back through all of last year.

He cannot find one.

He goes back further.

He is sixteen. He is in his grandmother's kitchen in Osaka and it smells like cedar and rice and the particular something that is specific to her, that he has been reaching toward ever since and never quite finding anywhere else.

The trip was his parents' doing — complicated logistics he had not asked about, a summer gift from arrangements he was not supposed to notice. His mother's face in the airport in Montreal, something carefully contained. His mother's face in the airport in Tokyo, something else — something released, something that had been held in for a long time coming slightly undone in the specific direction of home. The particular way she held herself differently once they were there. More at home. More like whatever version of herself existed before she became the version Shane knew.

His grandmother's house was smaller than he'd expected and warmer. The entryway had a particular smell — cedar and something cooking and something underneath both of those that Shane did not have a word for then and does not have a word for now, something that was just her, just this place, the specific accumulation of a life in rooms. His grandmother had looked at him with an expression he could not fully read and had said something to his mother and Yuna had laughed and put her hand on Shane's shoulder: she says you have my eyes.

His grandmother is small. Smaller than his mother, which he had not expected. Her hands are the hands of someone who has been doing things with them for a long time — certain, efficient, moving through tasks with the economy of long practice. She shows him things without making a production of showing him. She simply does the thing and then watches to see if he has understood, and if he has not understood she does it again, slightly differently, and waits again.

It is the third day. He is in the kitchen with her.

She is teaching him to make mochi. He cannot quite get it — the right pressure, the right motion, the way the dough should feel. He keeps applying too much force and then too little, can't find the middle. She does not say anything about him getting it wrong. She watches for a moment — patient, unhurried, the eyes of someone who has taught things before — and then she moves his hands. Repositions them without comment, adjusting the angle of his wrist, the placement of his palms. He tries again and is still slightly wrong and she adjusts again. Her hands are warm and dry and matter-of-fact.

Rice flour is everywhere. On the counter in drifts, on his forearms, in his hair, which he won't discover until later, sticking to the backs of his hands in a fine white coat that won't brush off cleanly. He doesn't notice. The kitchen is warm, the window above the sink framing a small garden his grandfather tends — a few carefully maintained plants, some stones, the specific contained order of a garden in a small space. Somewhere else in the house his parents are talking, his father's voice low and his mother's occasionally brightening into laughter, muffled through the walls.

He doesn't mind any of it.

He is sixteen and his hands are wrong and covered in rice flour and he is failing to do the thing his grandmother is showing him and she keeps adjusting without comment and the kitchen smells like cedar and rice and something warm from the oven and his mother is laughing somewhere in the house and he is just — fine. Not performing fine. Not managing fine. Just fine, in the uncomplicated way of a person who is not running anything through anything. Who is just here, in a kitchen, with flour on his hands.

"I was sixteen," Shane says. His voice does something he didn't plan for. He clears his throat. "My grandmother. She was teaching me how to make mochi. In her kitchen in Osaka."

Dr. Okonkwo writes something. She doesn't say anything.

Shane looks at the succulent on the windowsill. He had to go back a decade. He searched every year between now and then — every meal, every trip, every team dinner, every room service order, every restaurant assessment — and a decade is where the honest answer lives, and he is only now, in this room, running into the edge of that.

He doesn't say that. He looks at the succulent.

He is still winning. He tells himself this. He came in here to demonstrate that he is a person who is fine, who takes his health seriously enough to attend this appointment, and he has attended it. The mochi is just a memory. A good memory. He is allowed to have good memories about food from when he was sixteen without it meaning anything about now.

The succulent looks back at him. Someone has been tending to it consistently for a long time. It has not died.

"Is there something," Dr. Okonkwo says, "that you want to eat? That you feel like you can't?"

The framework answers what he does. What he has chosen, what he has determined supports his performance, what he has researched and committed to. It is very good at answering those questions.

It does not answer want.

Ilya's kitchen. Sunday evenings — the smell of it, something doughy and savoury, Ilya at the counter unhurried in a way he is almost never unhurried, folding and pressing, patient with it. My mother made these. I make them worse but I keep trying. Shane had said he wasn't hungry. He had watched Ilya's face do something careful and not say anything, and had changed the subject.

He had not been hungry. This is true. He is almost never hungry in a way that feels like an emergency — the framework takes care of that, keeps things regulated, keeps the question from becoming urgent. He had not been hungry. He had also wanted to eat them. These are not the same thing and he has never before noticed the gap between them. He understood the connection that Ilya was offering and refused it.

A kitchen that doesn't exist yet. A child who doesn't exist yet. And Ilya. Flour on his hands again — rice flour or something else, something that traveled a different route. His grandmother's hands. Ilya's mother's recipe. Both things arriving in the same place at once, both things handed forward.

I want to teach my son how to make pelmeni with Ilya.

He hasn't thought it in words before. And now it is there, concrete and particular and entirely his, and the size of it is taking his breath slightly.

Underneath it immediately, darkly: you have to get there first. The future doesn't exist yet. It requires things he hasn't given yet.

He sits with that. Then he sits with the wanting again.

It's still there.

"Yes," he says. He doesn't say what.

She makes a small note. "Have you ever turned down time with friends or family," she says, "because food would be involved?"

Shane looks at her.

"Yes," he says. "Of course."

She waits.

"But that's not — that's not what you're implying." He keeps his voice even. "That's just dedication. You don't get to maintain something like this, and play at the level I play, and also eat wherever anyone wants to go. Those are incompatible. I made a choice about which one mattered more, and I made it a long time ago, and it's held." He pauses. "Plenty of elite athletes make the same call. You don't get to this level by prioritizing convenience."

The words arrive easily. He believes them. He has always believed them — team dinners he arrived at already having eaten, invitations declined because the restaurant wasn't somewhere the framework could be maintained, Ilya's birthday dinner last year where Shane had moved food around his plate and Ilya had watched him move it and neither of them had said anything. He had gotten home and the numbers had been fine and that was the point. That was always the point.

"You feel that's worked for you," she says. Not a question.

"Yes." He holds her gaze. "Eight years in the league. Consistent performance numbers. I'm not struggling. I'm not injured. Whatever concern has been flagged about my eating — I understand why it looks concerning from the outside. But the evidence is my career."

"The evidence is your career," she repeats.

"Yes."

She writes something. She doesn't say anything.

Shane looks at the waterfall through the open door. He is still winning this. He tells himself this.

"What do you feel," she says, "when food comes up? In conversation, in planning, in social situations?"

"I feel clear," he says. "I know what I'm doing and why. Other people spend a lot of energy on decisions I've already made. That's not stress. That's the opposite of stress."

"Is it ever anything else?"

He can still hear the waterfall from the waiting room. The constant drip, drip, drip meant to lull him into safety and complicity.

"Sometimes there's — when something changes. A substitution. A restaurant that doesn't have what I need." He pauses. "There's some stress around that."

"How much stress?"

He is quiet for a moment. He is trying to answer this accurately, which requires locating the actual amount rather than the acceptable amount. The two are not always the same.

"More than the situation warrants," he says finally. "Probably."

Dr. Okonkwo looks at him. She does not say: yes, that's right. She does not say anything. She just looks at him in the way she has been looking at him, which is receiving without reacting, and Shane sits in the room with what he just said.

More than the situation warrants.

He said that. It came out of his mouth in this room. He is not sure, sitting here, that he has ever said it before — has ever let that particular gap become visible, the gap between how much the stress is and how much it should be given what the situation actually is. He has always moved past that gap too quickly to look at it.

"What do you feel it about?" she says. "The stress. Generally."

The closet. The locker room. The performance of a version of himself that doesn't include Ilya, doesn't include the specific way the name sits in two syllables when you say it correctly, doesn't include the fact that he spent time alone in his apartment practicing until he got his boyfriend’s name right always. He can hear it now, every time someone in the room says it wrong — the extra vowel, the flattened consonant, the announcer's mangled version that drives Ilya insane — and he says nothing. Because saying something would mean explaining how he knows. The version of himself that has been performing so long it sometimes stops feeling like performance and starts feeling like the thing itself.

"There are a lot of things I can't control," he says. "Things where the outcome isn't up to me."

She writes something.

"When do you first remember feeling that way?" she says. "About food specifically."

Shane's mouth closes.

He knows where this goes. He knows the shape of the territory he would have to walk through to answer that question honestly, and he is not sure he is ready to walk through it today, in this room, with this stranger. The session has not gone the way he planned. He came in with a plan and the plan has been — not failing, exactly. But not going the way he expected. The mochi. More than the situation warrants. The wanting he hadn't let himself name before it named itself in this room.

He needs a second.

He takes it.

Ilya had come to him carefully.

The care of it. The way Ilya had been watching for weeks, maybe longer, had held the thing he was watching while he was still working out what to do with it, and had chosen his moment and his words with a gentleness that was not Ilya's natural register, that had cost something to produce.

Tuesday in February. Ilya four months in Ottawa. Shane had driven up on a day off because they had three days before both of their schedules filled back up, and he had learned not to let three days pass without using them. He arrived in the early afternoon. Ilya made tea. Shane unpacked groceries he'd had delivered to this address because the service had his usual order and it was easier. The delivery had arrived that morning; Ilya had signed for it without comment and left it on the counter.

There had been a substitution — one item replaced with something comparable but not the same. Shane was assessing it. Quickly, without appearing to do anything, the way he did most things he didn't want to appear to be doing.

"Hey," Ilya said. He was leaning against the counter. "Can I ask you something?"

"Sure." Shane was reading the back of a package.

"About your eating."

Shane's hands stilled on the package. One beat. Then he kept moving, set it down and reached for the next thing.

"What about it," he said.

"I've been thinking about how to say this." Ilya's voice was quiet. Shane could see him in his peripheral vision — the careful posture, the deliberate staying-back, giving Shane the counter and the groceries and somewhere to put his hands. "I don't want to fight with you. I want you to hear that, and I’m saying this because I love you."

"Okay," Shane said.

"I know what this job costs the body," Ilya said. "I know what a week costs, a month, a season. We have been doing this for a very long time. I know my body the way I know the ice. And we are not that different. Size wise, not really." He paused — choosing the next part, Shane could hear it. "And I've been watching you for a while, and I need to say it: what you're eating is not enough for what you do. The math doesn't work. I've been holding it because I wasn't sure, but I've been watching long enough to be sure."

The words were simple. Said without accusation. They landed in Shane's chest and Shane felt them land — felt the thing inside him that wanted to open in response — and he shut it down. Methodically, from the outside in. One layer at a time.

He turned around.

"I'm sorry?" His voice was even.

"I'm not telling you to eat like me, I'm not an idiot." Ilya met his eyes. Held them. "I'm saying the math doesn't work. What goes in and what you're asking your body to do. I can see it."

"You can see it," Shane said.

"Yes."

"Right." He nodded slowly. "So walk me through your methodology. You've observed — what, exactly? Decreased adipose tissue? Altered body composition metrics? Are we talking about perceived fatigue indicators or something measurable? Because I'd love to understand the basis of your assessment before we go further."

Ilya looked at him. "What?"

Shane kept going. He kept his voice even, helpful, the voice of someone patiently explaining something. "I'm asking what you're basing this on. Caloric deficit relative to my training load? Macronutrient imbalance? Because those are different problems with different interventions, and if you're going to tell me my nutritional framework is inadequate, I'd like to understand which specific component you're identifying as the point of failure."

"Shane—"

"I'm not trying to be difficult." He turned back to the groceries. "I'm asking you to be specific. Because you're making a claim about something I've spent years studying, and I think that's a reasonable thing to ask for. Specificity."

Ilya was quiet for a moment. Shane could feel him trying to find the ground, reaching for words that would hold the weight of what he was trying to say, and Shane knew — he knew exactly what he was doing, knew that the ground he had just pulled out from under Ilya was the ground Ilya had spent twenty years building in a language that was not his first, and that the technical vocabulary Shane had just deployed was the specific kind of vocabulary that didn't translate, that lived in English journals and English curricula, that Ilya would know the edges of but not the interior. Shane had known this when he started talking. He had aimed at it deliberately.

"I don't need the technical words," Ilya said finally. His voice was careful. "I have eyes. I watch you. I know what it looks like when someone is not eating enough."

"You have eyes," Shane repeated. Pleasant. "And I have a framework with a name and research and years of performance data. But you have eyes, so." He picked up a package and examined it. "What it doesn't require is a second opinion from someone who doesn't have the vocabulary to evaluate it."

He saw it land. He was watching Ilya's face when he said it — the exact moment it arrived, the small adjustment, the managing beginning.

And he thought, standing there with his hands on the groceries in Ilya's kitchen, about a different evening, a different room. Ilya's apartment in Boston. The west-facing windows, the summer light. Ilya's hand finding Shane's and placing it, open-palmed, against his throat. The warmth of it. The pulse. Il-yuh. Two syllables, compact, the vowels close together. The specific private thing Ilya had offered — not because Shane had asked correctly but because Shane had asked at all, because Shane had said that's not good enough about a thing that most people let pass, and Ilya had looked at him with the thing behind the amusement and had said: give me your hand.

Shane had stood in his Montreal apartment afterward saying it to himself. In the shower. Making coffee. Alone in his car. Saying it until the approximation was gone, until the extra vowel he'd been putting there for years was gone, until what remained was just the name, correct, automatic, his. He had done this. He had practiced Ilya's name in private until it was right because he could not stand the idea of getting it wrong, because close enough had felt like a kind of failure he was not willing to carry.

He had kept that. The right way to say the name. He had kept it as something that was only his, that existed in the space between what he showed people and what he actually was.

And now he was standing in Ilya's kitchen using the same seam. The English. The vocabulary. The specific exposure of someone who had built something extraordinary and careful in a language that was not his first, in a league that had not been built for him, over years of choosing precision over speed. Shane had spent three months in this apartment learning what Ilya was, what he kept, what mattered to him. He had stayed long enough to find these things. And he had found the seam, the place where the English could be made uncertain, and he had gone there deliberately, and he was using it now.

He saw the unguarded second in Ilya's face. Ilya's mouth opening and then closing, reaching for a word on ground Shane had just pulled out from under him.

A sick feeling arrived in Shane’s stomach; it froze his diaphragm and worked its way up until it squeezed his heart. He couldn’t look at Ilya as vitriol crawled up his throat and forced its way over his tongue and out past his teeth.

"I appreciate the concern," he said. He turned back to the groceries. "I really do. But this conversation isn't one I'm going to keep having."

Something moved through Ilya's face then — not the unguarded second, not the managing. Something older and quieter than either of those things. He pushed off the counter.

"Okay," he said.

He crossed the kitchen. Shane heard his footsteps on the stairs — unhurried, because Ilya never stormed. The bedroom door closed quietly.

Not slammed. Quietly.

Shane stood at the counter with his hands on the groceries.

He stood there for a long time. He thought about Ilya's face — not the moment the vocabulary word had landed, but the moment after it. The thing that had moved through and gone. He thought about I think you mean well and the way Ilya had looked at him when he said it. He thought about I don't want to fight with you, said at the beginning, before Shane had decided there was going to be a fight anyway.

He ran through the tally. Ilya's concessions, Ilya's adjustments, the careful accounting of what Ilya had moved toward Shane. He tried to make the confrontation fit somewhere in that accounting. Tried to frame it as self-protection. As the reasonable response of someone whose wound had been touched.

The tally was built for tracking what other people gave up. It had nothing to say about choosing the sharpest available instrument and using it.

He had done something that needed to be answered for.

He did not move for a long time.

Dr. Okonkwo is quiet for a moment after Shane finishes describing the confrontation. She has not written anything during the last several minutes. She has just listened.

"How long ago was this?" she says.

"February," Shane says. "Eight months."

"And you haven't talked about it since."

"No."

"Have you wanted to?"

He looks at his hands. "I've thought about what I'd say. If I was going to."

"What would you say?"

"I don't know yet." He pauses. "That's why I haven't said it."

She nods. She writes something. "Can I ask you something about the conversation itself? Not about Ilya. About you, in it."

"Okay."

"You described it very precisely," she says. "The specific words you used. The moment you saw it land in his face. The feeling that arrived while you were still talking." She looks at him. "That's a lot of detail for something that happened eight months ago."

Shane is quiet.

"I've thought about it a lot," he says.

"What do you think about, when you think about it?"

He looks at the window. The January outside it, white and flat. He has been in this room for almost an hour, and the window has not changed.

"I think about the fact that I knew," he says. "That's the part I keep — I knew what I was doing. I could feel the sick feeling and I kept going anyway." He stops. "I've done things I'm not proud of before. This felt different."

"Why different?"

"Because I used something he gave me." He says it slowly, finding it as he says it. "He showed me something. The name — he put my hand on his throat and showed me how to say his name correctly. That was — he didn't have to do that. Most people would just let it go. But he offered it." He pauses. "And then in the kitchen I used the same thing. The same exposure. I knew where it was because he showed me."

Dr. Okonkwo looks at him. She does not say anything for a moment.

"That's an important thing to know about yourself," she says.

"I know."

"Do you understand why you did it?"

"I needed the conversation to stop," he says. "I've said that."

"I know what you've said." Her voice is even. "I'm asking if you understand it. Those are different things."

He sits with that.

"I was scared," he says. It comes out flat. Not an admission, just a fact. "He was right and I was scared and I needed it to not be happening."

"What were you scared of?"

The framework. The clarity of it. The way it has answered every question for eight years. The way it runs automatically now, before he's conscious of running it, so automatic it has stopped feeling like a choice and started feeling like just — how things are. If Ilya was right, then how things are was wrong. And if how things are was wrong, then he had been wrong for eight years, and he had built something that looked like discipline and felt like discipline and was called discipline, and it was not discipline, and he did not know what it was, and he was not ready to know what it was.

He was not ready in February. He is less certain about what he is ready for now.

"I don't know how to exist without it," he says. "The framework. I don't — I've been doing this since I was eighteen. I don't know what I eat when I'm not doing this. I don't know what I want. I don't know if there's a version of me that knows how to just — eat something." He stops. His voice has done something he didn't plan for it to do. He steadies it. "That's a strange thing to not know about yourself."

Dr. Okonkwo is quiet for a moment.

"It is," she says. "And it's also the beginning of knowing it."

He looks at the succulent. Someone has been watering it for a long time. It has not died. It has just kept being there, unremarkable, quietly alive.

"Is that why you made the appointment?" she says.

He is quiet for a long time.

He had told himself: I went. I can show Ilya I went. I'm fine, see, I went. He had believed this when he pressed call. He is not sure, sitting here, that he believes it entirely anymore. The session has not gone the way he planned. The mochi. More than the situation warrants. The wanting that arrived without his permission and is still there. And now this — saying out loud, to a stranger, that he doesn't know what he wants. That he doesn't know how to exist without the thing that is hurting him.

That is not what a fine person says.

"He loves me so much, and I was so fucking mean to him," he says. "And since then, he's been careful around me. He doesn't mention food. He makes his tea and doesn't offer me any. He's stopped leaving things on the counter that he knows I won't eat." He pauses. "He's routing around me. And I don't want him to have to do that."

"Is that the only reason you came in?"

Shane looks at his hands.

"No," he says.

She waits.

"I want something," he says. "I want — there are things I want that I can't have right now. Because of this. Because of the way I'm — the way I do this." He stops. "That's new. Knowing that's new."

She nods. She doesn't make anything of it. She just receives it and writes it down and lets it be what it is.

They sit in that for a moment. Outside the window, Ottawa is doing what Ottawa does in January, which is be relentless and white and particular. Shane has been in this room for almost an hour. He came in with a plan and the plan has not survived contact with the session. He is not sure what he is walking out with instead. Something less tidy. Something that does not have a clean shape yet.

"Can I ask you something?" Shane says.

She looks at him. "Of course."

"Is this—" He stops. He is not sure how to ask the question he is trying to ask. "People like me. Athletes. Do they — is this a thing that happens."

"Disordered eating in athletes is extremely common," she says. "Male athletes specifically are underdiagnosed. The behaviours that flag in other contexts read as dedication in a sports context. That's not a bug in the system. It's a feature of the culture." She pauses. "It doesn't make it less real. It makes it harder to see."

Shane looks at his hands.

He has been in a culture that read what he does as dedication for eight years. He has been reading it as dedication himself. He does not know, sitting here, how long it would have continued without Ilya noticing, without Ilya saying something, without Shane saying something back that brought him to this room.

He does not say this. But he sits with it.

"Okay," he says. "That's — okay."

It is September in Ilya's house; Ilya is still in the process of making it his, still having opinions about where things should go that he expressed by simply moving them and presenting the new arrangement as though it had always been that way. The throw blanket on the back of the couch had migrated twice. The lamp in the corner had been repositioned once in a way Shane still isn't sure was an improvement, but which Ilya clearly felt strongly about. September and five days off and both of them in the house without anywhere to be, which was a condition Shane had been learning to receive without immediately filling.

Ilya had put on music. Something with a beat — something from his phone, something Shane didn't recognize, something that made Ilya tap his hand against the counter in the kitchen while he was making tea, an absent percussive thing, not performing enjoyment just experiencing it. Shane had been in the living room reading. Or trying to read. Mostly tracking Ilya by sound — the kettle, the cabinet, the specific sound of that particular spoon against that particular mug.

Then the hand-tapping stopped and there was a different quality of quiet, the quality of Ilya deciding something, and then he appeared in the doorway with his mug in one hand and his other hand extended toward Shane, palm up, with an expression that dared Shane to make anything of it.

Shane made nothing of it. He set down his book and took the hand.

They are both terrible at this. Ilya, who can do things with his body on skates that make sports analysts run out of adequate language, is somehow entirely wrong-footed in his own living room without them. He keeps mistiming his movement relative to the music. His hand on Shane's waist is at the wrong height and keeps adjusting, which doesn't help. Shane keeps stepping on his feet, which he wouldn't if Ilya would commit to a direction, but Ilya appears to be making directional decisions in real time with insufficient data and changing his mind partway through.

"You're terrible," Shane says.

"I'm bad at the steps," Ilya says, with dignity. "I'm good at the other part."

"What other part?"

"This part," Ilya says, and pulls Shane in.

This solves the problem of the steps by eliminating the steps. They are not dancing. They are standing close together in the middle of Ilya's living room while music plays from Ilya's phone on the counter in the kitchen, which is slightly too far away to hear clearly, which means the bass more than the melody, which is enough. Shane's face ends up against Ilya's neck because that is where it goes when they are standing like this — because Ilya is slightly taller, because this is where the angle works, because this is where Shane's face has learned that it goes, through iteration, through the specific accumulated knowledge of having stood like this before.

Ilya smells like his soap and faintly like the tea he just made. His arms are around Shane's back, settled now, not adjusting anymore. His chin rests on the top of Shane's head. They are not moving. The music from the kitchen does what the music does.

He is not managing anything.

There is no right answer to where his hands should be. Nothing he is getting correct or incorrect. He is standing in a room with his face against someone's neck and his eyes are closed and outside Ottawa is cool and muggy, and inside the lamp is on and the blanket has been moved twice, and the music is slightly too far away and none of this requires anything from him.

And then, without choosing to: the kitchen in February. The groceries on the counter. Ilya's mouth opening and then closing. The thought arrives without invitation, the way these thoughts do — not loudly, just present, the way something is present when it lives in you and you have been carrying it long enough that you stop noticing the weight until you put it down and feel the absence of it.

He stays. He doesn't move his face from Ilya's neck. Ilya's arms don't tighten or loosen. The music does what music does.

He thinks about his grandmother's hands repositioning his. The patience of it — the willingness to adjust without comment, without making the adjustment into a lesson, without requiring that he get it right before she showed him again. He thinks about a kitchen that doesn't exist yet. A future that is still on the far side of things he hasn't done yet. A child who doesn't exist yet. Ilya beside him in that kitchen, both of them getting something wrong, flour on their hands, neither of them minding.

This, something in him says. This is what you've been keeping yourself from.

He doesn't say it. He keeps his face where it is. Ilya's arms don't move. He lets it be here — both things, the kitchen in February and this, the damage and the dancing, both of them true at once, which is harder than letting only one of them be true.

He suspects it is the only way any of this works.

"I want to ask you something," Dr. Okonkwo says, "and I want you to take your time."

Shane nods. He has been looking at the succulent. He looks at her instead.

"When you talk about the eating framework — the intention, the optimization — I notice you don't talk about it with any pleasure." She pauses. "Not with distaste either. It's very neutral. Like you're describing a system you've installed." She looks at him. "I'm curious what it's doing for you beyond the performance. What it feels like to be inside it."

This is the question he expected. Not this exact version, but something in this neighborhood — the question that wants him to justify the framework, to defend its legitimacy. He is ready for this.

"It feels like clarity," he says. "It feels like knowing exactly what I'm doing and why. Most people spend a lot of energy on decisions I've already made." He pauses. "That's not a burden. That's the opposite of a burden."

"Okay," she says. She writes something. "Is there anything the framework costs you?"

Shane is quiet for a moment.

This is not the question he expected.

"No," he says.

She waits.

"It's a commitment," he says. "There are things I don't eat. Events where I have to manage the situation. But that's not a cost. That's what it takes." He stops. "Other people don't want to do what it takes. That's their choice. I made a different one."

"Have you ever wanted to make a different choice?" she says.

He looks at the succulent.

The pelmeni on Sunday evenings. The smell of them. Ilya at the counter with flour on his hands, patient with it. My mother made these. I make them worse, but I keep trying. Shane sitting at the table with somewhere else to be in his own chest, the wanting already there before he knew it was wanting, the answer already no before the question was asked.

He had said he wasn't hungry. He had not been hungry. These are not the same thing, and the gap between them is sitting in this room right now and he is aware of it in a way he has not been before.

"No," he says.

It comes out a beat too late.

She writes something. Looks up.

"Do you think you're fine?" she says.

Shane is quiet.

"I want to be normal," he says. "I want to — I want to not have to think about it. I want to eat something because I want to eat it and not because I've already decided whether it's allowed." He stops. "I don't know if that's the same as being fine."

"Plenty of people struggle with anxieties around food," she says. "Especially in your profession. That doesn't mean it's not hurting you."

He looks at his hands.

"I don't know how to fix it," he says, and he feels the smallest he has ever felt in his life. He is small, and helpless and he knows with certainty in this moment she could crush him like a bug.

"That's okay." Her voice is even. "My job is to know how to help you. You did your job. You came in."

He sits with that for a moment. It is a small thing and not a small thing — the idea that showing up was sufficient, that he did not have to arrive already knowing the answer. He has spent a long time arriving places already knowing the answer.

"I want to be clear about something before you go," she says. "This is a long process. It's not going to move fast and it's not going to be linear. There will be sessions that feel like nothing happened. That's not failure. That's just what this looks like."

Shane nods. He is good at long processes. He has been in the league for eight years. He knows what a long process looks like.

He is also aware, in the way he is aware of most things he does not say, that he has spent eight years being good at long processes by controlling every variable of them. This is a long process he will not be able to control. He does not say this.

"Before next week," she says, "I want you to think about three things. A short-term goal — something small, something in the next few weeks. A medium-term goal, a few months out. And a long-term goal. What does better look like for you. Not fixed. Not perfect. Just — better."

Shane looks at her. "What counts as a goal?"

"Anything that's yours," she says. "Not what you think I want to hear. Not what sounds right. What you actually want."

He thinks about rice flour. A kitchen that doesn't exist yet. A Sunday evening where he doesn't say he isn't hungry.

"Okay," he says.

"Same time next week?" she says.

His grandmother's hands on his. Repositioning without comment, without making the adjustment into a lesson.

You deserve the kitchen.

He thinks it and it stays thought. He does not argue it back into nothing.

This is new.

"Yeah," he says. "Same time."

He stands. He finds his jacket. He walks out through the waiting room, past the small waterfall still making its sound. He goes out into the January cold of Montreal. It hits him clean and immediate and he is, already, pulling himself back together.

He is good at this. He has had a lot of practice.

He takes out his phone.

Types: On my way.

Looks at it. Types: Can we talk tonight? Really talk. I owe you a real apology.

He is aware that he does not know how that conversation goes. He is aware that sorry is not a guaranteed outcome, that Ilya gets to decide what he does with it, that Shane does not control that part. He files this the way he files things — noted, set aside, not looked at directly — and sends the text before the filing is complete.

He gets into the car. The engine turns over. The heat comes on.

By the time he pulls onto the 417 he has the framework back. Not intact — something shifted in that room that he cannot unshift, and he knows it, and he is not looking at it directly. But the surface is smooth. He is a professional. He knows how to drive a car and think about something else.

The drive back is the same road. The same flat winter geography. The same Montreal dissolving around him as he takes the exit, the same streets he has learned in his fledgling adulthood. Ottawa materialized slowly and all at once. The streets that he learnt how to drive on, and has since reacquainted himself with because Ilya moved into a house on a street Shane did not know and Shane learned it the way he learns routes, methodically, until it was automatic.

He pulls onto Ilya's street.

The house is lit from inside. The lamp in the living room, the specific warm quality of it, the one Ilya leaves on when he's elsewhere in the house. Someone has been home all day. Someone signed for the grocery delivery this morning and left it on the counter without comment and made his tea in his specific mug and has been in this house all day, waiting, being careful.

Shane sits in the car.

He thinks about Ilya at seventeen arriving in a new country with a language he had to build from scratch, choosing his words carefully because precision mattered to him, because he had decided the words were worth getting right. He thinks about Ilya muting the television and taking Shane's hand and placing it against his own throat — the patience of it, the willingness to be held still and be learned. He thinks about Ilya coming to him carefully, choosing his words with a gentleness that cost something to produce, offering Shane a door.

Shane had looked at all of that — the patience, the gentleness, the careful love of it — and found the seam and pushed. Ilya trusted him completely, and Shane had thrown it back in his face.

He is aware, sitting in this car on this street, that he has never in his life wanted to be better for someone the way he wants to be better for Ilya. He is aware that this is not a small thing and that he has been treating it like something he could manage around the edges rather than something that requires him to actually change. He is aware that the appointment this afternoon was supposed to be ammunition and instead left him sitting in a therapist's office saying I knew where to hurt you out loud to a stranger, and that the stranger had not flinched, and that somewhere in the not flinching something in Shane had come slightly unmoored from what he'd intended when he walked in.

He has the words. I knew, I chose, I'm sorry. He does not know yet how to make them land as what they are. He does not know whether Ilya will receive them or what tonight looks like after. These are variables he cannot control.

He gets out of the car. He knocks — doesn't use his key, because some things you must go toward.

The door opens.

Ilya looks at him. He is wearing the shirt with the small imperfection near the collar, the soft one, the one Shane recognizes as the sick-clothes shirt still, because it has been that kind of day. He looks tired. He looks careful. He looks like someone who has been home all day being careful about what he leaves on the counter and whether he offers tea, someone who has been routing around something he loves.

He just looks at Shane. The thought present and held.

"Hey," Shane says.

Something moves in Ilya's face. Not much. Just a little.

"Hey," he says.

Shane steps through the door. The cold comes in behind him and then the door closes and it is warm, and it is Ilya's house, and it smells like tea and like whatever this house has come to smell like in the months Ilya has been living in it, and Shane is home in a way he has not let himself say out loud yet, in a way that has been true for longer than he has been willing to admit.

He is here. He is going to do something about it.

The conversation starts.