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The new meds are also an SSRI. Shane asks Durand why they’re changing the medication, and she tells him that only about 40 percent of people with OCD respond to the first SSRI that they try. Shane appreciates that she’s honest. He doesn’t care much about the studies she cites—he was always terrible at math and science—but it makes him feel better that she does cite them.
The pills are bigger. Durand says OCD treatment is most effective with high doses. They increase the dose as the days go by. She tells him it can take weeks to see benefits from the treatment. He’s disappointed by that. His past experience with medication has been acute, always: pain meds that get him back in play within a few minutes, antibiotics that kick an infection in a week. This feels like he’s grasping at something that isn’t really there. He wonders if it’s a placebo.
She also tells him that this is the kind of medication that he’ll be taking long-term.
“What, like my whole life?” Shane thinks of road trips, the impossibility of discretion or secrecy when you’re crammed together with a bunch of other guys all the time for days.
“We’ll refer you to a psychiatrist in Ottawa when you’re discharged, and you’ll work with them to decide on your long-term pharmacotherapy,” she says. Shane frowns. She’s dodging the question.
The list of side effects that she walks him through are embarrassing. Durand asks him questions that he hates.
“Have you ever had thoughts about hurting yourself?”
Shane thinks about Ilya. Irina. No. He has ninety-nine problems and wanting to kill himself isn’t one. Then he’s sad that he can’t tell Ilya that joke.
“No.”
“You’re safe here, and it’s important that if you start having thoughts like that, about hurting yourself or other people, that you talk to me or Kieran about it right away,” says Durand. And then she moves on, like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Shane guesses this is just another day at the office.
Durand tells Shane that he might have difficulty maintaining an erection or ejaculating, and he starts to revise his previous answer about not wanting to kill himself. He might have a decreased appetite.
“Isn’t that kind of ironic?”
She smiles at him good-naturedly, somehow still managing to have a no-nonsense energy about her. “In medicine, we’re always weighing benefits and drawbacks. I think this medicine has a higher potential to help you with eating by treating your OCD than to make eating harder by suppressing your appetite. But if it bothers you, talk to me. We can always make a change.”
Given how little control he has over his life here, Shane doesn’t exactly trust that statement, but she keeps going. He might have insomnia, or he might be sleepy. He might have indigestion or heartburn. He might gain weight, but it probably won’t be very much.
“What if I don’t want to take it?”
Durand clicks her pen. “You’re here of your own free will, Shane. But as long as you are here, we expect you to comply with the medication protocol that we put you on.” She sounds like a coach that he had when he was thirteen, explaining how bag skates were for their own good. How no one is making them play hockey. How many other boys would kill to be in their place. Shane was always the fastest, right up until he signed with Montreal.
“Okay.”
So he takes it every morning, right before breakfast. Swallows with water. Sometimes he thinks he feels the pills lodge in his throat. He obsessively monitors his own body. At night, he jerks off just to make sure that he still can. He doesn’t know if the new meds are helping, but it hasn’t been long. Maybe they still will help.
Or maybe this is all a fucking waste of time, the worst part of his brain tells him sometimes, when he punches the too-thin pillow and tries to sleep. Maybe you’re not fixable.
The day that Game Changers Hockey Camp starts, Shane wakes up at seven. Showers, dresses, shaves. He rolls on deodorant and brushes his teeth. In a monochrome brown sweatsuit that Rose gave him for his most recent birthday, he shuffles downstairs to take his meds, supervised like a child. He sits down for breakfast and feels a little nauseous. Counts on his fingers until the nausea stops. Names species of birds. He’s started naming birds that aren’t even on the wall. There was a rookie in Montreal, right before he left, who was inexplicably obsessed with bird-watching. Shane didn’t realize just how much he had picked up.
He doesn’t taste his eggs, or his toast, or even the cold chocolate Boost. Everyone he loves most in the world is together in Ottawa, plus some people he gets along with in a professional capacity. And Ryan Price. He hasn’t been on the ice in over one hundred days.
There’s a lot he’s allowed to do now. His labs are better, everyone tells him, and he’s taking his meds how everyone wants him to take them. He’s allowed to do yoga, and his mind feels almost clear when he’s in downward dog, head below his heart, listening to every beat—not in the pulse-counting, frantic way that he’s used to, but in time with his breath, emptying his brain of anything except the feeling of his hands and feet pressing into the thin mat. He can’t go for walks alone, but he could take supervised walks. They make him feel like a toddler, so he doesn’t take them, but he could. He’s allowed to choose little pieces of his meals—bread or white rice, which dessert he’d like. It’s been a hot, dry summer, none of the standard Ontario storms to break the stifling humidity, so he’s always choosing ice cream, even though the only options are vanilla and chocolate, and he’d kill for this specific s’mores flavour at Ilya’s favourite Ottawa ice cream shop, off the tourist drag, which calls itself a microcreamery.
Thinking about it now, Shane realizes that it’s his favourite ice cream shop, too. He can’t remember the last time he had a favourite anything, when it comes to food.
In therapy, when Shane mentions this, Kieran latches on and has him write a list of foods he genuinely likes.
“That make you happy,” Kieran says. “They can be safe foods, too, but I’d encourage you to challenge yourself. Think about what your favourite things to eat were when you were a kid. Or what you’d want to order for dinner on a special occasion if there weren’t any rules to follow.”
The first thing Shane writes down is s’mores ice cream from Adirondack Creamery. Just to get himself started. Kieran is really deliberately not looking at him, sorting through one of his desk drawers, but Shane still wishes that he wasn’t being watched, because now he’s having a hard time thinking of anything else.
When he made his first World Juniors team, his parents took him out for dinner, and he ate a medium-rare sirloin, because it was the leanest cut on the menu, and had his potatoes steamed, not mashed. The last special occasion he celebrated that wasn’t hockey-related was his wedding.
He starts with safe foods, because Kieran said they were allowed. Rx bars (chocolate sea salt). Wild salmon. Sweet potatoes.
Shane tries to think further back. When he was really little, his dad would buy him a soft pretzel after every game if he had an assist or a goal in it.
He writes down soft pretzels but specifically eaten in a hockey rink and hopes that counts. On second thought, he adds, with French’s yellow mustard. It has to be French’s. Heinz is an abomination.
My mom’s tonkatsu.
Spaghetti and meatballs with a lot of parm. He’s more of a ravioli guy, if he gets to choose, especially ricotta and spinach, but Ilya scarfing down plate after plate of pasta while Shane tried to avoid having a panic attack at the table is one of his strangest happy memories.
It gets easier, the more he writes.
FULL SUGAR gingerale. Shane underlines full sugar. He only started drinking the diet version when he turned thirty, feeling ashamed that, as an elite athlete, he’d let himself sink calories and carbohydrates into something so useless for so long. He tells everyone that it tastes the same. It doesn’t.
Buttered popcorn. The first time he and Ilya went and saw a movie together at a theatre, they shared the largest popcorn size that the concessions counter would sell them. Their fingers brushed in the popcorn during the movie like they were a couple of high schoolers about to start making out in the back of the theatre. They did make out, but only a little.
“Shane?”
He looks up. Kieran is fidgeting with a pen.
“How’s this feeling to you?”
Shane looks down on his paper. “Hard.”
Kieran nods. “What’s difficult about it?”
“I just don’t think about food as enjoyable, mostly,” Shane admits. “I have to eat, like, thousands and thousands of calories a day during the season just to keep going. It’s more like a chore.”
“It brings you a lot of satisfaction to be disciplined,” suggests Kieran.
Shane grins. “Well, duh.” He looks at his paper. “I did come up with a few… I don’t know if I really did it right.”
“No one is grading you.” Kieran tries a different metaphor when Shane blinks at him, unimpressed. “There aren’t, like… stats… for this.”
Shane laughs, chirps, “Glad you’ve been doing your hockey research. Name one stat.”
“This isn’t about me. Is there anything on your list that you’d like to share?”
Now that Kieran’s asking, Shane squirms. “Well, safe foods first. Cause I couldn’t think of anything. Like, salmon. I love salmon. I liked it way before hockey, too, and before all this.”
“How do you like to eat it?”
Shane thinks.
He wants to say that the best way to eat salmon is sake sashimi, the tiniest trace of wasabi on top of the fish, but he hardly ever eats Japanese food, and besides, he worries that maybe eating it raw with basically nothing on it will sound super disordered, so instead he says, “I like how Ilya grills it. He does this dijon maple syrup thing sometimes.”
Kieran nods. “That sounds really good. Ilya likes to cook for you?”
“Yeah. We kind of take turns. He doesn’t usually like what I cook.” Shane remembers eight burgers on the back deck. Ilya chirped him, said he couldn’t do math, but he ate so happily. He scarfed down three and a half before he gave up, hand on his stomach, and informed Shane that unfortunately he had died. Green smoothies and egg white omelets for breakfast do not seem to have the same effect. “It’s hard… sometimes, eating together?”
No follow-up question this time. Kieran waits for him to continue.
Eventually, he does, staring at his list, his messy handwriting. “I just feel like he’s watching me and, um. Just waiting for me to do something wrong, I guess. He’s really obsessed with what I eat.”
“Hmm.” When Shane doesn’t say anything, Kieran asks, “When did that start?”
“I don’t know. I guess before we lived together. But when we moved in, we fought about it a lot more, obviously.” Shane swallows hard, a lump in his throat. He’s been trying not to freak out and indulge in what everyone is calling compulsive behaviours, but his skin feels itchy, not in a place where he can scratch, but just under the surface. The inside of him feels dirty. He starts to tap his feet.
“Right.” Kieran pauses. “It would be challenging, I imagine, when food is already stressful, to also have it be a point of conflict in your relationship.”
“And then I’m a huge dick to him and fuck everything up,” Shane says sullenly. “Because he put too much olive oil on the broccoli or fucking whatever.” He scoffs. “Like, my super hot and adoring husband made me dinner and now I’m crashing out about nothing, and then he’s all upset and I want to die. And it’s like, yeah, that’s how he expected me to act in the first place, probably, so I’m just proving him right.”
Kieran looks thoughtful.
Fuck, the lump in Shane’s throat was the beginning of tears, which are threatening to spill now. He tips his head back as though that will stop it. “It shouldn’t be this stressful,” he says quietly. “It’s not for everyone else.”
“You know what I think about shoulding yourself, Shane.”
“Not in your office,” Shane mumbles.
“There’s a bathroom right down the hall,” Kieran says, not bothering to disguise how pleased he is at his own joke. “Do you have anything on your list from before food felt stressful to you?”
“Soft pretzels,” Shane says immediately, relieved that Kieran seems to be changing the subject.
“Tell me about them,” says Kieran.
Shane does. He tells Kieran that he can’t remember how the tradition started, only how much he loved it. After games, he’d emerge from the locker room, stinking and exhausted, flushed with pride, and there his dad would be, pretzel in hand. Something about the salt and the grease, the carb hit after playing, felt almost as good as the hug his dad would give him. Shane always tore off a piece for each of his parents, and they always let him, because it felt good to share the spoils of victory. Even if his team lost, even if Shane’s goals or assists didn’t mean anything at the end of the day, he always got a pretzel.
Shane misses his dad. He tells Kieran that, and Kieran nods.
“When’s the last time you ate a soft pretzel at a hockey rink?”
Shane laughs out loud, a surprised bark. “I have no idea. Maybe… fourth grade?”
Kieran looks a little sad. Shane frowns at him.
“How do you think it would feel to eat one now?”
“Right now?”
“Not right now, unless we’re keeping a hockey rink around here that no one’s told me about,” Kieran clarifies. He takes Shane’s literal thinking in stride, and Shane appreciates that about him. “When you go home.”
Shane’s feet tap faster. He tries to imagine it. The crinkle of paper under his fingers, protecting them from the heat. Around him, the chemical ice scent. Huge flakes of salt that melt on his tongue. The crust, then the softness underneath.
He feels sick.
“Um. Scary.”
“That’s okay,” Kieran says.
He wants a pretzel so bad. He wants to burn all concession stands down and maybe never eat anything ever again. He wants to be a kid, playing hockey with no stakes, before everyone knew he would be someone. Fuck, fuck, fuck, he’s crying in Kieran’s office—and not just crying, big, body-wracking sobs that shake him, that make noise. He tucks his head down to his knees, guarding himself with his arms.
“I’m sorry,” Shane says. The words are muffled. When he glances up, Kieran has pushed the tissue box to the edge of his desk, closer to Shane. Shane takes one. It feels woefully inadequate. Even so, he blows his nose. “Sorry.”
“Wanna talk to me about what’s going on?”
“I want a pretzel,” Shane says. “Except I don’t.”
“Or the eating disorder doesn’t want it,” Kieran suggests.
“Or the OCD doesn’t,” Shane counters. Kieran nods.
“Or that.”
“I want a pretzel,” Shane says again, more certainly. “Sometimes I think the eating disorder is just another compulsion. I feel like—I just have to follow the rules, or—”
It’s the first time he’s said the words out loud. Eating disorder.
Shane hadn’t wanted to use the ward phone, because it’s in the middle of everything, not only supervised, but within earshot of whoever is in the lounge and cares to listen. Also, it’s probably disgusting, considering how many people touch it in a day. Shane doesn’t know where their hands have been.
But it’s late afternoon, and camp will be over, and he needs to talk to Ilya like he needs his heart to pump blood. More, probably.
The first ring doesn’t even finish before he hears his husband’s voice in his ear. “What’s wrong?” There’s background noise that makes Shane’s stomach clench—people, music.
“Where are you?” he asks first.
“With other coaches. Price is here, and Hunter and Barrett. We are ‘shooting the shit,’” says Ilya happily. “I have so much to tell you. These kids are insane. Little girl is skating circles around boys two years older.” Then he’s serious again. “Why are you calling? Are you okay? Do you need me to come? I can call your parents, they just left—”
Shane cuts him off. “Nothing’s wrong, I’m okay.”
“Okay,” says Ilya, relieved. “Good.”
“Just, I’m sorry.”
In the brief silence that follows, Shane can hear the tinny chord progression of Pink Pony Club. It fades, and there’s the sound of a door, then quiet as Ilya steps out of the locker room, into the nominally-more-private hallway.
“Sweetheart, no,” Ilya says.
‘
“Just let me talk, Ilya.” It comes out too firmly, and Shane makes an effort to be gentler when he continues. “For literal years, you’ve been trying to take care of me and I… wouldn’t let you… and I’m sorry. I’m sorry I get angry at you for no reason. I’m sorry for judging what you eat. And what I eat. And for scaring you. Just, for everything.”
Ilya sounds very tender when he says, “My love. It is okay.”
“No, it’s not.” Shane’s trying to keep his voice level, because semi-public lounge, but it breaks a bit. “It’s the opposite of okay. It’s so fucked.”
“Okay, maybe not okay. But I forgive you.”
Shane leans against the wall. “I love you so much.” There's nothing he wants more in the world than to kiss Ilya, to be holding him right now, against him.
Ilya says, “I’m sorry for not understanding what was happening sooner. And I am sorry for…” He searches for the word. “Pushing you. No. That’s not right.”
Shane thinks about Christmas cookies. “I think I know what you mean.” He presses the phone harder against his ear, like he could get closer to Ilya by doing it. “I forgive you, too.”