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It isn’t even a dirty hit that sends Shane down, and that pisses him off more than the injury. He feels old and slow when the impact comes, and then something collapses in precisely the wrong way, and he only feels bright white pain, then nothing.
When Shane opens his eyes again, the pain is still there. “I have deja vu,” he says, and no one seems to hear. Ilya is beside him, holding his hand. That’s good. Better. Where’s his glove? Ilya must have taken it off. He’s not sure how long his eyes were closed for. Murmuring from the crowd. Boston players hovering nervously, trying to see past the Centaurs, and then being shuffled away, off the ice.
Medics. Hands on him, not Ilya’s familiar hands, but professional, stranger’s hands, palpating gently. His helmet off. Shane is never cold in the rink, but he’s cold now, sweat and some other fluid somewhere, cooling on him too fast, and he wants his gear off. He blinks. It’s bright, too bright, and loud.
There is concussion protocol. There is, as much as he hates it, a concussion. He knew that as soon as he went down; he remembered the feeling. He remembered how the stretcher felt around him, the claustrophobic straps to keep him in place. He feels the pain distantly, his left leg feeling wrong. He can’t move his head to look at it, but he knows; they’ve cut off his gear, and that can’t mean anything good. Mostly, he feels tired as they ferry him to the Ottawa Hospital. His ears ringing and the lights above him too bright. He thinks he might have lost consciousness, for a second, on the ice. He can’t remember now. His vision blurred, then snapped back into focus; the world spun. A medic shines light at his eyes.
“Equal and reactive.”
He wants Ilya more than anything. There were seven minutes left of play. Shane doesn’t know if they’ll let him leave.
At the hospital, Yuna and David appear, almost as soon as they wheel him through the doors, into the emergency room, and he wonders how they could have possibly beat him here.
“Oh, baby.” Shane’s mom looks pale and sick.
“I’m okay,” he says, or does he? Because she does not look convinced. “Ilya?” he tries.
“He’ll be here soon,” she says. People are working around him. He’s been hooked up to something. People keep shouting. Then there’s pressure on his leg and he hears a sound like a wounded animal, realizes it’s him.
David keeps trying to hold his hand, and nurses keep pushing him out of the way, so he hovers near the door, looking on, looking helpless. Shane tries to smile at him and isn’t sure if he manages.
“We’re getting you something for the pain,” someone says.
Yuna asks what they’re giving him. Numbers and explanations. It’s not long before the opiate haze of pain medication shrouds him.
He’s lucky it wasn’t a career-ending injury. He can access this thought now that the pain meds have kicked in and he’s at home, Ilya hovering and over-fluffing his pillows, his stupid traitor left leg elevated in the sling that his mother and Ilya spent most of his last day in the hospital installing.
He remembers it like he’s watching it through hockey rink plexiglass: the boards rushing towards him, the sickening crunch, cold of the ice on his back, people standing over him. Blood that he couldn’t see through his pads but could feel, oozing over his skin. He wondered if he’d be able to skate on that leg again, after it bent like that.
No one really knew, for days, and people kept asking him, as though he would know any better.
There’s so much to be managed before he can process what’s happening to him. There’s surgery that night; another, the following afternoon. There’s Ilya, Barrett, Harris, Hayden, JJ, his mom, though he wishes she would leave sometimes. There are a million calls from Rose, though she’s filming, and he’s too tired to hold up his phone, so it rests beside him on the thin hospital pillow. He knows there are reporters—Yuna is always on the phone, but thankfully, no one mentions them to him.
And now that it’s done, being injured is the most boring thing in the fucking world. He can’t look at screens for very long, so he can’t watch the rest of the season, or any of Ilya’s games. He can’t even FaceTime Ilya when he’s on the road, instead settling for the phone-line-warped sound of his voice. He knows that the Centaurs aren’t playing well and feels responsible.
Video games and television are right out, and he can’t read very much. He spends a lot of time in his own head, waiting in the foggy time between meals, then eating mechanically. Appointments punctuate the lugubrious days: physiotherapy, which feels premature; assessments, endlessly; preparing to start training again, when he can; feeling his body change under him, lose itself, its power, its strength, though Ilya keeps telling him that’s his anxiety talking. He sleeps, fucking constantly. A psychologist talks to him about the rehabilitation process, how he’s feeling about being held back like this.
“I’m just excited to get back on the ice,” he tells her, like she’s from the media. Like he was trained to do from the time he was a teenager.
It’s February and he’ll be out until next year, though he was sure they’d make the playoffs this year, maybe even had a chance at the conference final. He’s got no clue about the Centaurs’ prospects now, and neither do the fans. Apparently the player who hit him—a freakishly huge Boston rookie called Eekhout—keeps getting death threats online. Eekhout visited him in the hospital, mortified-looking and apologetic.
“I thought I should bring you a gift or something, but I didn’t know what,” he said in a low voice, looking around the room at the mylar balloons and stuffed animals and flowers.
“I think I’m all set for gifts,” Shane had replied. Eekhout looked like he was going to drop dead or something, so he continued, “It’s just the game, man. We’re all good.”
“I feel fucking terrible, I’m sorry,” Eekhout said, the words spilling out of his mouth. Rookies look younger to Shane every year, and Eekhout’s no exception.
“It’s really okay,” he’d said. Almost meant it.
Strangers keep sending him flowers, even when he’s home. Anya tries to eat them, when she’s not trying to scamper onto his lap and fuck up his bones for life.
David reads him his texts from teammates. Shane knows what it’s like to watch someone go down like that, and feels sick thinking of them. It’s hard to respond. Sometimes he tells his dad to just type whatever he wants in reply. People visit, and he knows that he’s sullen and unpleasant, and can’t help himself.
In his worst moments, he’s glad that he can’t tolerate the screens, because he doesn’t think he could manage watching the Centaurs—watching Ilya—play without him.
After the cast comes off, everything is more extensive: ice baths and heat therapy; exercising again, finally, on the bike, walking, low-impact, everything, feeling out the weight he can bear, trying to decide if he’s imagining the pain or not; a knee brace that scratches at him when he wears it. They have to start so slowly, because the concussion lingers, and at first he can’t move for long without feeling dizzy and needing to sit down.
He has to eat what feels like an impossible amount of food, and it nauseates him. Before the injury, Shane’s nutrition plan was difficult enough. He spent a lot of time staring at Ilya’s plate and fantasizing about food. Now he’s eating less, using less energy, but the amount of protein, the bland monotony of it, is sickening.
Shane thinks about food all the time.
When he eats, he does math, can’t stop himself. His body failed him again, let him down, and he feels like he’s barely holding it together as it heals under him, despite him. For a few years now, he’s known he’s no longer in the keep getting better phase of his career, but in the do what you can to play as well as you can for as long as you can, because it’s only going to get worse phase. Before the injury, he was playing great hockey, but it was difficult, he felt every bit of it. The season’s fatigue settled in harder, more crushing.
When he eats, he feels every second of his thirty-one years. It’s like Shane can feel every atom that enters him, and he can almost see what they all do. When Ilya offers him gingerale, he practically sees the sugar, its rot in him, and he asks if they can get diet.
His boyfriend looks incredulous. “Head injury was worse than they thought,” he says. “I am calling the hospital right away.”
Shane rolls his eyes, tries to laugh. “It’s just empty calories. I don’t need them.”
Ilya looks at him strangely, for a long time, and brings him water instead. He bends down to kiss Shane on the forehead, and Shane feels small and adored.
With so much time off, he tries to act like a real person, one whose life isn’t consumed by hockey and thinking about micronutrients and macro goals. Rose wraps filming on the most serious project she’s done in a couple of years, a horror in which she plays a woman who’s recently miscarried. The film’s haunting is a metaphor for trauma, she informed him over text when the casting was announced.
Back in Canada for weeks before the press cycle for a different project starts up, she’s with Shane constantly, especially when Ilya’s on the road. April comes and goes and the Centaurs, though they tanked in the rankings after Shane’s injury, are in the playoffs. Ilya’s season isn’t over, not yet.
“Did he tell you that you have to keep an eye on me?” Shane asks one afternoon in May, when they’re out for lunch. It’s a busy, popular high-end Italian place that he let Rose choose, though, reading over the menu after she sent him the address, he immediately regretted it. There’s approximately nothing that he can eat here, but she’s happy to be finished filming, unworried about how she looks for now. Even out for lunch, she’s dressed casually, wide-legged jeans and a Blue Jays crewneck sweater.
“No!” Rose protests. They’re nursing drinks, her with a glass of Chianti, Shane with soda water and lime. She’s used to him drinking in the off-season, and she raised her eyebrows when she ordered, but Rose is too polite to comment on whether he consumes alcohol or now. “Maybe a little, but I told him that I’d be checking in on you whether you needed a babysitter or not, because you’re my Ottawa bestie.”
Shane smiles in spite of himself. Ilya’s protective side has been out in full force since the injury, and he knows it’s hard for him to be travelling while Shane’s stuck at home, putting in endless, dull days of light aerobic exercise and reconditioning. He takes a sip of his soda and the paper straw has gone soggy.
Rose tells him about the brief fling she had with one of the supporting actresses while they were filming in Ireland. He has to stop her when it starts to get graphic.
“People can hear you!” he says.
She shrugs. “I’m not naming any names,” she says with her coy smirk, and finishes her glass of wine before they’ve ordered. It’s busy, and the server has been away for a while, but still.
When the server does return, Rose is ready.
“Could I please do the cacio e pepe, and let’s get a caprese to start, we’ll share that. And one of each arancini.” The server is writing quickly, nodding. They look over at Shane expectantly.
“Oh, I’m good,” he says.
Rose stares at him. “Sorry?”
“I’m okay,” he repeats.
“I’ll come back,” says the server, sensing tension before Shane does.
Rose is frowning at him. “What are you doing?” she asks.
He shrugs. “I can’t really eat anything here, on my diet plan.” Does he catch her pressing her lips together, breathing out slowly?
“Shane, babe,” Rose says, “You’re not even playing right now.”
He runs his thumb over his pinky, ring finger, middle finger, index finger, counting, counting, counting until he realizes that he has to speak. “I know, that’s the problem,” he says. He can hear the whining tone in his voice and hates it. “It’s going to be months before I’m allowed back on the ice, let alone into actual practices, with actual contact. I need to be taking care of myself if I want to be ready for the next season.” Who knows how many seasons are even left? he doesn’t say.
“Taking care of yourself doesn’t include…” she looks down at the menu, scanning it in its entirety, “pasta? Oh my god, this menu is mostly pasta.”
“It definitely does not include pasta.”
“Ceasar salad?”
“Parmesan, eggs, croutons,” Shane says dismissively.
Rose looks at the table. “I need to stop saying stuff like this in public places,” she says, and he has no idea what she means. “They have tuna.”
“Fine,” Shane says, because he hates the look on her face. The tuna is breadcrumb-crusted, probably fried stove-top in oil, served over white beans that he could probably eat if they weren’t supposed to have cream mixed in. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Sorry,” Rose says. “It’s just a little familiar, that’s all.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Shane asks, though he knows already that he doesn’t want to hear the answer.
“I work in Hollywood, babe,” Rose says, looking around for the server. Maybe this conversation is too hard to have; maybe she didn’t plan to talk to him about this; maybe she’s just impatient. Shane takes his cloth napkin from the table and balls it up in his fist to keep himself from losing it. He can smell every piece of food in the whole room all at once, and it makes his stomach churn. “I basically have a degree in disordered eating.”
“Sorry?” Shane asks. “That’s not what’s happening here?”
She looks back at him, sips her water, something almost like pity in her eyes. Shane bristles at it. She loves him and he trusts her as much as anyone in the world, and he wants to shout, wants to get up and storm out, cause a scene. His chest is tight.
“I don’t want to, like, come for you,” she says. “I know I’m not an expert in performance diets. It just seems like there’s a lot of shit you’re not allowed to eat.”
“Yeah, there is, but you don’t have to pathologize it,” Shane says snappishly.
The server re-emerges, saving him from whatever Rose was about to say. “Are we ready?”
“Yes,” he says too loudly, and cringes at himself. “Can I do the tuna without the breading?”
“Sorry, we prep it ahead of time?”
He sighs. “Fine. Um. Let’s just do the caesar salad, dressing on the side, please, no croutons, and can I add the chicken to that?”
“Sure thing.”
“Wait, how do you cook the chicken?” he asks, suddenly nervous. The whole time the server explains it, he can feel Rose’s eyes on him.
After they order, she changes the subject, mercifully. They talk more about her movie, and he complains about not being able to play. Since he’s been back on his feet, he’s been killing time with charity, hosting a viewing party of the Centaurs’ first playoff game for kids at the children’s hospital. He tells Rose about the kids who seemed less excited to see him than their parents.
“I guess if your kid’s in the hospital, you probably need some cheering up,” she says, and that makes him feel better.
“There was this one, I guess he was like twelve or thirteen, and he kept asking me about Ilya,” Shane says, cutting his chicken into smaller and smaller pieces. He accepted two slices of tomato and basil from the caprese salad they were meant to share and made Rose eat all the arancini. She’s still plowing through her pasta, dabbing at the corner of her mouth with the napkin between bites.
She raises her eyebrows. “What about Ilya?”
“Like, how we met. What it’s like playing together.”
“Oh my god! Was he…?”
“Rose!” He laughs. “You can’t just ask if children are gay.”
“But was he?”
Shane recalls his poorly-painted nails, his hovering protective parents, how he fawned over Ilya. “Oh, absolutely.”
“Cuuuute. You’re like, a role model.”
“Gross,” says Shane. “Children should not look up to me. This job is fucked up. No one should do it.”
“Tell me about it,” Rose says drily.
Three or four tables recognize him when he gets up to go to the bathroom, but they’re nice about it. “We were all really worried about you,” says a short-haired woman in aviator glasses and a flannel shirt. “Sucks to have you out for the playoffs, but this could still be our year.”
“Trust me, it sucks even more for me,” he replies, signing her ballcap. It’s a Jays cap, but it’s the only thing she has. Shane feels ridiculous.
He takes most of his salad to go. After he walks Rose to her Uber, he throws away the container, guilt biting at him, hot and clean.