Chapter Text
“I can’t eat this.” Shane said.
He was looking down at his plate of tuna salad, which he had ordered without the potatoes and anchovy fillets, with dressing on the side. It was the only item on the restaurant’s menu Shane deemed safe to eat on his high performance athlete diet.
In retrospect, he wondered if he should have ordered the house salad with an olive oil and vinegar dressing instead. As Shane watched their waiter retreat, pleading silently for him to turn around, he wondered if it was too late to change his order now. If he was polite, maybe they would take his tuna salad back and switch it for a house salad. Or a garden salad. If he said ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and ‘athlete’, maybe they would let him have a side salad on the side of his water.
His mother, who was in the middle of an anecdote about their current kitchen remodelling, paused. She glanced at Shane as if noticing he were there for the first time, even though they had their usual hug and catch-up when they were seated at the table earlier that evening.
In front of her, Yuna had a vast bowl of pasta covered in a creamy white sauce. It was the kind of dish Shane used to love as a kid, when his metabolism could burn through anything. He shuddered at the idea of eating it now. All that dairy…
“What do you mean, honey?” She asked, confused.
Although Yuna hadn’t touched her entree either, it was for an entirely different reason. She was helping herself to a second slice of bread from the complimentary basket in the middle of their table. As she looked at Shane, she slathered on butter with her knife and then took a bite of it. Shane couldn’t imagine eating so mindlessly. Just watching his mother eat bread and butter like it was nothing made his anxiety start to scream and writhe. Attempting to do the same might have killed Shane at the table. He made sure to keep a safe distance from the offending basket.
“You asked for tuna salad, didn't you?” David looked similarly bewildered.
In fact, both his parents — who he agreed to meet for dinner tonight, before spending the rest of his weekend with Ilya — were all too aware of his order. Not only had it taken Shane a painfully long time to choose what to eat, while his father teased lightly and his mother made helpful suggestions, the waiter raised his eyebrows. Shane felt as if, in addition to wasting everyone’s time, he failed a test he didn’t know he was taking. He felt humiliated. He wanted to crawl under the table and die. After Shane explained he was on a special diet as a professional athlete, however, the waiter seemed to understand. He had written down the order attentively.
Or not.
“I asked for dressing on the side.” Shane said, trying not to sound like a petulant toddler.
He also expected the dressing to be a vinaigrette, consisting of vinegar and olive oil — maybe a little dijon mustard for flavouring. But this thick and viscous dressing, drowning the rest of his healthy salad, looked suspiciously like it contained mayonnaise. Shane didn’t eat mayonnaise. If he knew the dressing would contain mayonnaise, he wouldn’t have asked to have it on the side. Instead, he would have banished it from his plate completely. How could anyone expect him to eat mayonnaise?
“I can’t eat this.” He repeated, voice strained.
Since Shane embarked on his diet three months ago, there was one other time he encountered mayonnaise. His boyfriend was preparing food for both of them at his apartment.
Initially, Ilya wanted to make tuna melts. Not only was it one of his favourite dishes to eat, it was something he cooked often and had perfected the many times he had done so. In the past, Shane always loved the contrast between the crunch of crisp toasted bread and soft, sweet tuna between his teeth. He loved the stretch of the melted cheese. Even the salty butter was appealing, seeping into the pillowy bread and occasionally pooling on the plate. It reminded him of the afternoon in Ilya’s apartment, when his boyfriend cooked for him the very first time. After that, tuna melts signalled the snatches of domestic bliss they shared in secret.
That evening, Shane realised the only aspect of a tuna melt permitted on his new diet was the tuna. Thinking about bread, cheese, and butter struck him with paralysing fear. Shane couldn’t shake the feeling something bad would happen if he ate a tuna melt. He definitely wouldn’t win the next game he played. Sometimes, it felt he would actually drop dead if he ate something forbidden by his diet, as if he had developed deadly allergies to whole food groups.
Although his boyfriend scoffed and shook his head, Ilya dropped the suggestion and compromised by masking pasta. At that point, Shane was still willing to eat pasta — as long as it was wholegrain. His research assured him healthy carbohydrates were perfectly acceptable.
(By the time he met his parents for dinner, Shane had already cut any remaining carbohydrates out of his diet. He didn’t feel good after eating them. Maybe he had a gluten allergy. Did gluten allergies make people feel antsy and restless? He didn’t know.)
As Ilya started making them lunch, Shane felt the itch to check. He often got the urge to check things he had read, in case he made a mistake. On his phone, Shane covertly scoured the internet sites he trusted most to make sure wholegrain pasta wouldn’t affect his athletic performance. Reassuringly, the nutrition blogs and sports science magazines contained the same advice he read before. He knew he was being a little paranoid. But Shane was glad he checked anyway.
“What are you doing?” Shane looked up in alarm when his boyfriend went to the refrigerator and took out the bottle of mayonnaise.
“Making pasta salad?” Ilya quirked an eyebrow at him.
Without warning, a fist clenched tightly around Shane’s insides. It felt like his internal organs were being squeezed beyond the point of functioning — he couldn’t draw enough air into his lungs and his stomach tightened like he was going to puke. Even his heart, hammering rapidly in his chest, seemed to be trapped in a vice. Briefly, Shane wondered if he was having a heart attack.
“I can’t eat mayonnaise.” He said, relieved his flat affect hid the scale of his panic.
Ilya gave him the same look he gave Shane earlier, when he protested he couldn’t possibly eat bread. Or cheese. Or butter. It was a look of exasperation mixed with fondness, as if he simultaneously found his boyfriend’s stubbornness endearing and somewhat frustrating.
Briefly, Shane worried he was going to be stubborn too and insist on adding mayonnaise to the dish. His skin prickled with anxiety at the idea. Dampness began to gather under the arms of his borrowed t-shirt. He couldn’t eat mayonnaise. He just couldn’t.
“You know what it is made of?” Ilya said, returning the condiment to the fridge, “Eggs. The olive oil you love so much.”
Silently, Shane gnawed on the inside of his cheek. He didn’t know how to explain why it was so different when the ingredients were emulsified together. In reality, there was no logic to his fear. Shane knew that. But he also knew it would be impossible to eat his tuna pasta salad if there was mayonnaise clinging to the other ingredients. He couldn’t do it.
“Be careful, Hollander. I saw tomato ketchup in there. And it was close to the eggs, nearly touching.” Ilya teased as he closed the heavy metal door.
Watching his boyfriend return to the kitchen counter empty-handed, Shane felt relief wash over him. The tightness gripping his insides relaxed, allowing him to breathe normally again. It was almost like the euphoria he got after a good game, when he knew he had done everything right.
Although Ilya made a pointed comment later about the dryness of the pasta salad, when they were both eating at the kitchen island, he didn’t breach the subject again otherwise. Once Shane ascertained no mayonnaise had accidentally escaped from the sealed bottle and leapt onto his dinner, he managed to forget about it too. It wasn’t a big deal.
“Shane?” His mother peered at him curiously.
This was a big deal.
“I asked for the dressing on the side.” Shane repeated, in case he hadn’t made his problem sufficiently clear, “Didn’t I?”
Suddenly, he was starting to doubt whether he placed his order correctly in the first place. Shane was sure he remembered saying “no potatoes, no anchovies, dressing on the side”, the way he rehearsed in his head. Perhaps he only thought the words. Maybe he didn’t say them out loud.
“You did.” His mother soothed, reaching over to rest a hand on top of his, “They must’ve got your order wrong. It happens all the time in busy restaurants.”
“Maybe you can try to eat around it.” David offered as a compromise, “It doesn’t matter if you have a little dressing on your salad one time. Right?”
This whole time, Shane’s gaze had been fixed on his plate. He was unable to look at anything other than the dressing, which he was certain had soaked into the rest of the salad. There was a chance he could scrape most of it off the boiled eggs, green beans, and wedges of tomatoes with his fork. The tuna and lettuce, Shane decided, were already compromised.
Now, he forced himself to look up and at his parents. Both of them had strange expressions on their faces. Usually, Shane found it easy to understand how David and Yuna were looking at him, as he knew them as well as he knew himself. Now, he wavered. It seemed his father was trying to be encouraging, which was his way, but there was something off about it this time. His brows were pinched together. In his dad’s eyes, Shane thought he saw worry. On the other hand, his mom’s dark eyes seemed somehow knowing. He felt as if Yuna could see inside his head (or, at least, suspected what was happening in there) and found it more alarming than reassuring.
Shane made a conscious effort to school his face into a more neutral expression.
By now, it was too late to call the waiter back and tell him about the mistake. Even if it wasn’t, Shane knew he would be too embarrassed to do so. There would be something humiliating about sending the dish back to the kitchen, presumably to be remade from scratch, like he was a picky kid who refused to eat his vegetables. If he did, Shane and his parents would have to sit there awkwardly until his salad returned. Their food would get cold. They might ask questions he couldn’t answer. The waiter, the chef, or anyone else could take the story to the press. Being labelled a diva might was the last thing Shane wanted — other than inviting more questions about his eating habits, from the media in addition to the people he knew.
Absurdly, Shane knew the salad being fixed wouldn’t make a difference anyway. He wouldn’t be able to shake his anxieties about tiny globs of dressing being left on the plate, even if he couldn’t see them. Unless he went into the kitchen himself to watch the chefs to make the salad from scratch, using fresh ingredients from the pantry, on a brand new plate, he wouldn’t be able to shake his irrational fears. And, he was more than aware, either way he would seem like a crazy person. Shane felt like a crazy person. No matter what he did, he was trapped.
He took a deep breath as he picked up his knife and fork.
“Can you believe how much marble counters cost?” Yuna said, faux casually.
Without looking, Shane knew his parents were watching as his fork hovered over the plate, searching for the safest place to start. He stuck the prongs into a chunk of egg, which had no sheen of sauce on it, and forced it into his mouth. He chewed. He swallowed. Next, he picked up a piece of tomato and subtly wiped the hint of dressing onto the leaves lying underneath it. Chew. Swallow. By his third mouthful, he sensed his parents start to relax.
The conversation returned to normal, which meant his mother talking a lot, his dad adding follow-up comments, and Shane making a lot of affirmative noises to confirm he was listening. It would’ve been hard to fake an interest in kitchen renovations on a good day.
Soon, Shane had picked everything he deemed safe enough to eat from his plate. To his horror, it still seemed to be loaded with food. If he didn’t act normal for the rest of the night, he knew his parents were going to start paying a lot more attention to his habit. They might start asking about his high performance diet. Knowing his mother, Shane feared she would contact a nutritionist to get expert advice. Then, she might realise his healthy eating was based more on blind instinct and articles he read on the internet than anything Shane’s coach or doctor had told him. He didn’t need any of that right now. At the same time, he couldn’t eat dressing.
“How is… you know who?” David asked.
It was hard not to roll his eyes at his choice of words, although Shane supposed it was covert enough. Besides, he hadn’t worked out a way to refer to Ilya without sounding like a terrible undercover agent from a Rose Landry movie either.
“He’s fine, I guess.” Shane said.
In truth, he barely had the chance to talk to him since he drove into Ottawa that afternoon. The traffic sucked. Shane only got the chance to drop off his backpack and say a quick ‘hello’ before he had to get ready for the restaurant. As he changed his clothes, Ilya leaned against the doorway and lamented not being able to join the Hollanders for their family meal. Shane’s parents had been sorry he couldn’t come too. However, the chances of them being spotted together in Ottawa were too high.
Actually, even without his boyfriend here to cause a scene, Shane hoped nobody reported seeing him at the restaurant. He didn’t want anyone taking photos of him leaving or, worse, trying to follow his car to Ilya’s home. Thinking about it was enough to make his stomach twist unpleasantly. Maybe he should make a few diversions on the drive back, just in case.
“Any plans this weekend?” Yuna asked.
“You know we can’t leave the house.” Shane said, immediately regretting how surly he sounded, “Sorry. It’s just… you know. I wish things could be normal.”
This time, he knew exactly what his parents’ expressions indicated. It was sympathy.
He squirmed in his seat, wishing the topic hadn’t been brought up in the first place. It was a relief Shane didn’t have to lie to his parents anymore and he was grateful they had welcomed Ilya into their family, once they recovered from the initial shock. But his parents always wanted to talk about his relationship. How was it going? What was the next step of the plan? Did he feel sad-angry-weird about being in the closet all the time?
A benefit of being with Ilya, who preferred living in the moment over constantly worrying about the future, was only discussing their secret relationship when Shane wanted to. Ilya waited for him to bring it up first. And he understood exactly what he was going through.
While his parents tried their best to understand — something Shane was grateful for — they would never really know what it was like to hide who they were. Well, he knew his mother tried to hide her Japanese heritage and her status as a second-generation immigrant. She identified solely as Canadian and never spoke about her parents, who died when Shane was young. He guessed it was similar to him and Ilya when his own parents got together, being a mixed race couple in the 1980s (they didn’t talk about that either). He wondered what his grandparents, on both sides of the family, thought at the time. Had they been accepting, like Shane’s parents?
If his mother understood it was like what pretending to be someone else, she didn’t say so. It wasn’t the kind of thing they talked about in the Hollander family, until Shane was forced to come out of the closet. Now, when they did talk about things, it was all focused on him. Instead of making him feel closer to them, Shane felt distant from his parents and their attempts to connect with him about ‘the whole gay thing’. It made him feel like he was in an infomercial.
Quickly, his mom segued into her favourite topic: hockey.
“I heard Scott Hunter signed with Adidas.” She said.
Shane sensed where this was going and, in spite of everything, he couldn’t help smiling: “I already have a deal with Reebok.”
Which I’m going to lose if I don’t stick to my diet. Which I can’t do if I have to eat dressing.
As casually as he could manage, he unfolded his napkin and spread it across his lap. Aside from the hammering in his chest, Shane felt entirely disconnected from his body. It seemed his anxiety caused him to snap in half, split between his internal panicking self and his external self determined to get rid of the source of the problem. He knew he would feel better as soon as the food was off his plate and out of sight, meaning he wouldn’t have to eat it. The idea of dolloping the mayonnaise-coated salad in his mouth and swallowing, letting it sit like a weight in his stomach, was completely unacceptable. He couldn’t do it.
“Still, isn’t it nice to hear about gay hockey players getting sponsors?” Yuna smiled.
Shane realised it was going to be difficult to keep her away from Scott Hunter at the next NHL Awards and prayed her newfound enthusiasm for gay rights wasn’t going to blow his cover. If the last time they played was anything to go by, Hunter was already suspicious of Shane and Ilya’s relationship. If his mom started babbling about his ‘bravery’…
Subtly, Shane moved his plate closer to the edge of the table and rearranged his salad with his fork. He didn’t really want to talk about Scott Hunter with his parents. Especially in a public place. It was easier to focus his attention on his food.
“Very supportive of them.” David agreed.
His parents made eye contact with each other and Shane took the opportunity to scrape most of the salad off his plate with his fork. In one quick sweep, a fist-sized lump of tuna salad landed neatly on the napkin spread over his lap. Mostly. With the toe of his shoe, Shane nudged a few stray pieces of lettuce and wedges of tomato underneath the tablecloth. Dressing began to soak into his napkin. He worried about it leaking onto his lap and staining his pants underneath.
Shane went back to poking at his meal with one hand. The other remained on his lap, awkwardly covering the evidence of what he was doing in case anyone walked past their table. Neither of his parents seemed to notice him squeezing the dressing from his tuna with the tines of his fork before he dared putting it in his mouth. The fish seemed to stick in his throat when he swallowed.
“Did you see the photos?” Yuna continued, without sensing her son’s discomfort.
As she took out her phone to show Adidas promotional shots to her husband, Shane took the opportunity to slide the rest of his salad onto his lap. He left a few token leaves on the plate. The table hid his lap from sight as Shane bundled up the majority of his dinner in his napkin, squishing it into a compact ball. Carefully, he buried the napkin deep in the pocket of his pants. When he looked back up, Yuna was putting her phone away and David was focused on his own plate. They didn’t seem to think he was behaving strangely, if they had noticed him at all.
As he set his fork down on his empty plate, Shane felt the tight hold of his anxiety lessen a little. He thought he felt the bite of tuna slip down and splash into his stomach, no longer threatening to choke him. Underneath the table, Shane poked at the soft lump in his pocket and felt comforted to know it was in there, rather than being slowly digested in his stomach.
Best of all, his plate was closer to clean than it usually was when eating with his parents. Unlike at home, Shane couldn’t measure his portions out when they were present. Certainly, he couldn’t do it at a restaurant. To compensate, he had to overestimate his measurements and leave food on the plate. His mom nagged at him if he did that. He always dreaded hearing it.
At last, their waiter returned to the table: “How is everything?”
“I need to use the restroom.” Shane said, getting up quickly and using the excuse to manoeuvre past him without further conversation.
As he crossed the room to the identical set of the doors, marked by silhouettes of a man and woman respectively, Shane hoped there was nothing suspicious about his walk. He worried about his pocket bulging in an obvious way, but feared drawing more attention by looking down to check. Instead, he tried to walk normally into the bathroom.
He was haunted by an imagined scenario where the contents spilled from his pocket and landed with a splat on the floor of the nice restaurant. He could picture everyone staring at him, his parents included. The waiter would raise his eyebrows. Someone would snap a photo for Instagram. Even as the bathroom door dropped shut behind him, Shane couldn’t shake the imagined shame. He felt guilty about stashing food in his pocket when his parents weren’t looking. He felt ungrateful. He felt bad. He felt a little bit alarmed he had actually done it.
It isn’t my fault, Shane rationalised, I can’t eat food like that, I just can’t. It’s not my fault that they won’t respect my diet. I need to eat healthily. I’m an athlete.
Once the stall door was safely locked behind him, Shane relaxed. For the first time since his meal had arrived at the table (or maybe even since he had gotten to the restaurant), he was able to take a full breath. It was one of those stalls where the walls and door went from the floor to the ceiling, so he didn’t have to worry about anybody seeing his feet shuffling around nervously. He was relieved to see his dinner was squashed safely in the pocket of his pants, pushed down too deep to escape, and pried the napkin out. The tuna salad looked even less appealing now it was packed into a single wet lump of fish, egg, and vegetables, saturated entirely by mayonnaise.
Shane disposed of the evidence by tearing it up into tiny pieces and dropping it into the toilet bowl, trying his best to avoid the voice in his head insisting he was doing something wrong. This was not what normal people did. With shaking hands, Shane flushed twice to ensure all proof of his dinner disappeared from sight and exited the stall. Thankfully, he was alone in the room. He took precautions to scrub any traces of salad dressing from his hands before checking his phone.
Lily: Having fun?
For a long time, Shane stared at the message on the screen and tried to conjure up an appropriate response. When the text had arrived twenty minutes ago, he was scraping his dinner off his plate and onto the napkin in his lap. It wasn’t exactly what he would describe as fun. But he also knew, somehow, that this wasn’t something he could confide in Ilya.
His boyfriend didn’t understand the importance of sticking to a regimented diet and how it eased Shane’s anxiety about underperforming on the ice. How it eased his anxiety about… everything, actually. Being able to control his diet gave him a sense of control over his life. In fact, Ilya didn’t comprehend how much Shane’s anxiety made him feel out of control. Most of the time, it felt like Shane was tied in a constant knot. If he tried to escape, it only got tighter. And not in a sexy way.
Before Shane could compose an appropriate answer, the three dots indicating his boyfriend was typing bounced to life in front of his eyes. Shit. He probably saw the read receipt and knew Shane was standing there dumbly in the bathroom, fingers hovering over his phone keyboard.
Lily: Are you okay?
He didn’t know how to answer that one either. But Shane knew better than to be honest about how he was feeling right now. He didn’t want Ilya to worry about him, especially during one of the rare weekends they got to spend together. There were more important things for the two of them to do than discuss the ins and outs of Shane’s aversion to mayonnaise.
Besides, it wasn’t as if what happened tonight was a regular occurrence. He had never stealthily thrown his dinner in the trash before. If he had tossed out food before, when nobody was looking, it wasn’t intentionally so. He just didn’t want Ilya to feel bad or Hayden to worry or… Whatever. This was a one-off instance, because the waiter got his order wrong. And because he was away from his food at home, which was safe for him to eat. And because he needed to eat healthy to stay at the peak of his career. Shane would never do something like this again.
Unless I have to.
There was no point on dwelling on it anymore. He pushed it to the back of his mind.
Jane: You know what mom’s like. I’ll be home in less than an hour.
Lily: Say hi to Yuna and David for me.
Despite himself, Shane smiled as he slipped his phone back into his pocket and checked his reflection in the mirror above the sink. He looked normal enough. Time to return to the table.
With another breath to steady himself, Shane pushed open the bathroom door and spotted his parents across the room from him, in conversation with their waiter. Nobody seemed to be stressing about his absence, which was definitely a good thing. He didn’t need his mom to start asking questions about what he was doing in the bathroom (that would open a whole new can of worms).
As Shane was approaching the table, he spotted the waiter fetching three new menus: one for Yuna, one for David, one for Shane. His stomach dropped. Although he was too far away to make out what the fancy font on the front of the menus said without his glasses, it didn’t take a genius to know dessert followed dinner. Dessert.
I can’t eat dessert! Shane screamed internally.
When he arrived at Ilya’s home, Shane used his spare key to let himself in. He couldn’t remember when he made Ilya a copy of his keys and vice versa, although it was sometime after they spent their first summer together at the cottage. It was rare for him to be here when Ilya was out, so the spare key was mostly for sexy purposes. Still, he enjoyed seeing it clinking against his others and the decorative chains, shaped like a hockey stick and maple leaf respectively. It wasn’t too cold outside, but he shivered with relief anyway as he stepped into the warmth and closed the door.
Seeing Ilya’s familiar jackets dangling from the hook, shoes lying in a pile underneath, made him feel even warmer. Shane’s backpack was still lying open in the hallway, where he dropped it a few hours ago in his rush to get showered and changed.
“Who is it?” Ilya called from the front room.
Judging from the hum of indistinguishable voices in the background, he was watching something on the TV. Or maybe he was playing a video game. It was difficult to tell from the faint glow being cast onto the wall of the living room, which was the only other indicator Shane had. But the lights were shut off completely, in contrast to the kitchen where they were turned down low.
“David and Yuna’s second favourite son.” He replied, tongue in cheek.
After shrugging his jacket off and hanging it on the hook in the entryway, Shane toed off his shoes. It was comforting to see them snuggled up next to his boyfriend’s worn sneakers. Not for the first time, he wondered about buying them matching slippers for Christmas.
In his Montreal Metro socks, Shane padded into the room and found Ilya lounging across the couch, exactly where he expected him to be. Ilya was dressed in grey sweatpants and an Ottawa Centaurs sweatshirt, but he still looked like a fantasy come to life. His hair was damp from the shower. On autopilot, Shane leant over the back of the couch to kiss his cheek and inhaled his familiar musky scent under the sandalwood and bergamot shampoo. The plain box from the restaurant was in his hands. As Ilya turned his head to kiss him, he eyed the box with interest.
“Leftovers?” He guessed.
“Dessert.” Shane gave him another kiss as he handed it over, “My parents feel bad for neglecting you, I guess. It wasn’t the same without you there. Obviously.”
Ilya opened the white chocolate raspberry cheesecake with a cookie base and hummed in approval. Clearly, it had been the right choice. Shane spent an embarrassingly long time pouring over the menu, mulling over the different options as if he intended to eat it himself. He kept trying to work out which dessert would be safe to eat, panicking when he realised none of them were, then remembering he had only lied about sharing it with Ilya to get his parents off his back. While his parents ate their own desserts, he sipped black coffee and sucked on the free mints. To occupy himself, Shane tried to calculate when he had last eaten cheesecake.
“No dessert for you?” Ilya asked, as if his finger wasn’t in the process of scraping a portion of cheese from the top of the cake.
He knew Shane didn’t like white chocolate, regardless of whether he was on a diet. In truth, part of the reason he chose that particular dessert was to deter himself from being tempted. Shane wished the bright red raspberry swirls didn’t look so deliciously sweet.
“I split a brownie with my dad.” Shane straightened up, finding it difficult to look Ilya in the eye when he lied to him, “The doctor wants him to cut down his sugar intake.”
“I bet David loves that.” Ilya laughed to himself.
With a small smile on his face, Shane returned to the kitchen to fetch a fork before his boyfriend resorted to eating a whole slice of cheesecake with his fingers. He lingered by the refrigerator for a moment, feeling his stomach roll over in protest at how lacklustre his dinner had ended up being. As discreetly as he could, Shane tugged the door open and heard the distinctly loud peel of the fridge opening. He took out a ginger ale from where it was hiding among the army of Coca Cola cans. The remaining contents of the fridge were dire. Despite being in his 20s, Ilya ate like a ten year old boy who had been left unsupervised by his parents. None of it was edible.
To his relief, Shane spotted a bag of apples left on the counter. They had clearly been forgotten, if the grease-stained Little Caesar’s box beside them was anything to judge by. Before returning to the living room, he grabbed an apple and took a bite. He was still chewing when he handed Ilya his fork and sat on the couch beside him. Rather than watching ESPN, Ilya had opened Netflix and was hovering over the crime drama series they were in the middle of. It took them a while to watch any TV shows when their time together existed solely of nights and weekends.
“You’re still hungry?” Ilya commented in surprise.
Shane rolled his eyes, as casually as he could manage, and took another bite of his apple: “You’re literally eating cheesecake. And I know you had pizza delivered.”
In surrender, his boyfriend held up both hands. He set up the show to play and tossed the remote aside, scooping a generous bite of dessert with his fork. It looked so creamy and delicious, Shane worried he might start drooling. He crunched his apple more determinedly. If he gave in and took the nibble of cheesecake Ilya offered him during the opening credits, he knew he would feel awful later. Dairy sat heavy in his gut. Sugar gave him headaches. The guilt alone would keep Shane awake all night, knowing he had eaten a forbidden food. He shook his head at Ilya, smiling.
As the new episode started and Ilya started asking questions immediately about what happened in the last one — which they watched several weeks ago — Shane shifted closer to him. He rested his head against his boyfriend’s chest and felt the warmth of his body against his cheek. There were tiny crumbs scattered down the front of his sweatshirt. A perfect curl of white chocolate was perched on his stomach, obscuring the cartoonish centaur’s face.
“Is very good.” Ilya said, stabbing at another forkful of cake, “Sure you don’t want any?”
“I’m sure. I’m so sure.” Shane replied.
He forced his eyes to focus on the television screen, the sweet taste of apple turning slightly sour in his mouth. His stomach constricted. The last thing he wanted to think about right now was cheesecake and all the implications of it. Even one tiny bite would send him into a spiral of anxiety. After the dinner with his parents, Shane wanted to think about anything other than food. He wanted to escape into the private world he shared with Ilya.
“Okay.” Ilya’s voice was soft, tender.
A heavy hand rested in his hair, massaging at his scalp gently. Shane relaxed.