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At first, Shane is relieved by the fact that nobody is paying attention to him.
There are not as many questions, no sideways looks. Nobody is counting what’s on his plate or asking, “Are you okay?” in that familiary careful tone that always made his stomach twist.
He’s getting bad again and…
No one notices.
Then the relief curdles into something else.
He starts paying closer attention to the details. The way his jeans slide lower on his hips. The way his collarbones cast shadows he doesn’t remember earning. He pushes himself harder, eats less, works out more, sleeps less. He tells himself he’s just sharpening the edges, just for the playoffs.
Still—
No one notices. Not the coaches, who praise his discipline. Not his teammates, who joke about Shane’s “crazy metabolism” and shrug.
Not even Ilya.
And that…that part is the worst.
Ilya looks at him the same way he always has—steady, warm, unguarded. He kisses Shane’s temple after practice, pulls him in close like nothing’s changed.
“Jesus,” Ilya murmurs one night, hands settling on Shane’s waist without thinking. “You look good. Really good.”
The words land wrong.
Shane smiles anyway. He’s good at that. He’s perfected it.
“Yeah?” he asks lightly.
Ilya nods, thumbs brushing absently along Shane’s sides. “Yeah. Lean muscle. Strong man.”
Shane files the words away like a checklist item as Ilya kissed up his neck.
Lean.
Good.
Strong, though?
Isn’t that just a nicer way of saying big?
After that, it escalates.
He starts skipping meals more deliberately. He starts thinking out excuses in advance, planning them out so he could get away with only eating at home for as long as possible. He pushes past the dizziness instead of sitting down, almost getting high off the thrill of that fluttery feeling in his brain when he was about to pass out.
When the noise in his head gets too loud, he quiets it the only way he knows how. He eats everything in his kitchen, all of his snacks–Ilya’s too. Then he cleans it all up, hiding the evidence as if it never happened. And then he retreats to the bathroom and purges it all away, the shower running and the foggy tiled room always making him hate himself more than he already did.
Every day, he is losing himself more and more.
And no one notices.
Sometimes, lying awake beside Ilya after one of their hook-ups, Shane stares at the ceiling and thinks: If I were doing this right, someone would stop me.
But Ilya just breathes evenly next to him, arm heavy and warm across Shane’s stomach–blissfully unaware of the monsters running rampant in his rival’s mind.
“You okay?” Ilya asks once, half-asleep.
“Yeah,” Shane says automatically.
Ilya hums, satisfied, and drifts back off.
That night, when Shane gets back to his hotel room, he presses his face into the pillow and feels something crack open in his chest. He feels his heart literally break as he recalls his mother’s words from just last week. The way she had asked Shane if he was okay, and she also believed him when he said, ‘Yeah, of course.’
It’s not that no one cares.
It’s that no one sees him trying to disappear.
The comments keep coming as they always do. The small chirps about his diet, the foods he eats, and obviously, his body.
“You’ve been working out more, huh?”
“How do you stay so disciplined?”
“I wish I had your control, Holzy.”
Each one feeds the part of him that whispers: Go further. Do MORE.
Weeks pass, each day the same routine.
His body feels lighter, hollowed out, like it might float away if he stops paying attention. When he is on the ice, he feels weightless–skating faster and playing better than he ever has, really. Everyone is so proud of him, shocked by his growing skill and athleticism. He starts wondering what it would take—how far he’d have to go before the concern finally shows up.
Maybe if his struggles were more visible, like the scars on the insides of his thighs from when he was a teenager.
For a couple of years, he became very accustomed to pain and his reaction to it. Every bad game, every miss step at practice was reflected in a sharp draw of a blade to his inner thigh in the evening. It was…satisfying in the most disturbing of ways.
But it wasn’t anything crazy. They were practically cat-scratches, not like those crazy deep ones he’d seen online. He’d only gone that deep once, and it was completely on accident and scared him too much to ever do again.
He forced himself to stop eventually, when he realized how noticeable the scars still were even after months. Sometimes he slipped up, but for the most part–you couldn’t see them unless you were looking for them.
Ilya had noticed them a couple years into them fucking, or at least that's how long it took for him to feel comfortable enough to ask about them. Shane had obviously brushed it off, writing his younger self’s struggles off as simply “some dumb childish” reaction.
Sometimes he missed it, the power he felt when he harmed himself in that way.
This time there’s nothing to point to. This time it’s all internal—numbers in his head, rules stacked on rules, a constant hum of less, less, less.
Sure, his trainers noticed some of the weightloss–but he’d gotten really good at wearing bulky clothes and hiding weights in his underwear. He’d even chug gallons of water before weigh-ins, just to be sure.
It makes things easier, in a way, that Ilya isn’t around all the time–to see him chugging gallons of water at 4am or throwing his guts up at 4pm.
They’re on different teams. Different cities. Different schedules that only overlap in stolen nights and road trips and the kind of games that feel heavier because the other one is on the ice, watching. When Shane is alone, no one sees what he doesn’t eat. No one clocks how long he stays in the gym, how late the lights are still on in his apartment. There’s space to disappear quietly.
When they do see each other, it’s intense in a way that feels almost unreal—compressed time, borrowed moments. Hotel rooms. Empty apartments. Ilya’s hands familiar and grounding, his presence loud enough to drown out the worst of the noise for a few hours.
That almost makes it worse.
Because Ilya only sees him in flashes. Trimmed down, sharp, performing. Shane at his best—or at least what looks like it. He doesn’t see the aftermath. The shaking hands over a sink. The way Shane counts his ribs in the mirror like he’s checking inventory.
When they play against each other, it’s worse than when they’re apart.
Shane can feel Ilya’s eyes on him across the ice, can practically hear his laugh even over the crowd. He skates harder, faster, like he’s trying to outrun something. He takes hits he shouldn’t. He ignores the way his vision narrows at the edges.
After the game, win or lose, Ilya corners him in the tunnel, sweaty and flushed and bright-eyed. “You were flying out there,” he says, breathless. “Fuck, you’re unreal lately.”
Shane laughs, breath hitching just a little. “Yeah? Guess it’s working.”
Ilya grins, all pride and heat. “Whatever you’re doing—don’t stop. It’s so sexy.”
Shane nods.
He never tells Ilya that those words echo for days afterward. That they slot neatly into the part of his brain that’s already keeping score.
On his own team, the praise keeps stacking up. Coaches slap his helmet. Teammates rib him about how he never seems to slow down. The trainers don’t say anything—his stats are good, his numbers clean enough, his body still doing what it’s told.
That’s the thing. He’s still functional.
Which means no one intervenes.
He gets good at lying without technically lying. I ate earlier. I’m just not hungry. My stomach’s off from travel. All of it true, in a way. Hunger stopped meaning what it used to a long time ago.
Some nights, alone in another anonymous hotel room, Shane scrolls through old photos on his phone. His face rounder. His smile easier. He tries to remember what it felt like not to think about food at all. The memory feels fuzzy, distant, like something that happened to a different version of him.
He wonders—briefly, dangerously—if Ilya would notice if he got worse.
Not better. Not “healthier.” Worse.
If one day, across the ice, Ilya’s smile would falter. If his hands would still settle so easily on Shane’s waist, or if they’d hesitate. If that warm, unguarded look would finally sharpen into concern.
The thought scares him enough that he locks his phone and turns it face-down.
He tells himself he doesn’t want that kind of attention. That he’s fine. That this is temporary. That once the playoffs are over, he’ll fix it.
But the truth presses in, quiet and relentless:
He doesn’t know how to stop.
And until something breaks—his body, his game, or the carefully controlled version of himself he shows the world—no one is going to make him.