The door handle clicks. Jason’s shadow crosses the glass. Sophie straightens, wipes worry from her face with the speed of someone who’s seen too many locker rooms, and winks. “Barnacle on standby.” She squeezes my elbow and ghosts out the opposite door.
I square my shoulders, set the tea aside, pull on fresh gloves. Professionalism up. Armor on. The timer chimes.
Jason comes back smelling like cold water and mint soap. Damp hair curls at his nape, doing something to my concentration I refuse to name. I nudge the stool with my heel and gesture. “Sit. Mobility, then you’re cleared for light stickhandling.”
“Light,” he echoes, climbing onto the table with a hint of a grin. “My favorite intensity.”
“Lie to someone who believes you.” I cradle his forearm, guiding the wrist through slow arcs—flexion, extension, radial, ulnar. The joint glides warm from the contrast. “Any sharp pain?”
“Just dull. Manageable.”
“Good.” I switch to the tensor band and have him resist against my palm. Tendons jump, the wrap holds, and something inside me loosens a fraction. Small satisfaction is a safer high than the spark that leaps every time we make accidental eye contact.
We move through the plan: manual work, isometrics, grip strength with a soft ball, brief ice. I narrate without ornament—verbs, ranges, outcomes. He listens. He always did when the instructions had numbers attached. It’s everything without numbers that made us a mess.
“Travel starts Thursday,” I remind him, because saying it out loud makes it less a wave and more a tide chart. “Follow the protocol exactly. No heroics when the adrenaline spikes. If something feels off, you tell me immediately.”
“Copy,” he says, and I don’t miss the way his mouth softens around me. Not the trainer. Me. Unhelpful. I file it under not actionable and keep going.
I sanitize, log his vitals, send the update to Dr. Adams and Coach, and print a copy of the home exercises he’ll ignore unless I hand them to him personally. So I do. Our fingers don’t touch. The air still stings like a spark jumped.
“Questions?” I ask, because the script requires it.
He studies me like there’s one he wants to ask that isn’t allowed to exist. “No.” He slides off the table, shoulders setting into something I recognize—game-face, walls up. “Thanks, Lane.”
Professional. Clean. Exactly how I need it. So why does my chest pull tight as he reaches the door? Why do I picture hotel carpet and a keycard beep and the moment I chose myself and lost something I still miss in the dark?
I turn away and busy my hands with the trash, the sanitizer, the alignment of tape rolls into perfect little platoons. Structure is a bridge over the places I could fall through. He’s a body to keep upright, not a wound to poke. I repeat the litany until it sounds like a song I can sing without my voice cracking.
Sophie texts a single anchor word:Barnacle.A shell emoji follows. I huff a laugh and type back:Girl, I hear you.
The compressor clicks off. I strip my gloves, toss them, and make a road checklist: ice sleeves, portable stim unit, extra padding, second set of braces, the only tape brand he tolerates without swearing. I add earplugs as a joke to myself. I don’t erase it.
My phone buzzes again. Different tone. Higher priority.
Nolan Blackwood:We need you in my office. Urgent.
For a second the lighting flickers, or maybe that’s my stomach dropping a floor. Urgent with the owner never means cupcakes. It means headlines, injuries, or decisions that knock people off rosters. Or off payrolls.
I swallow. My hands are steady when I pick up my clipboard. My heart is not. I text back:On my way.
One breath—then another—and I step toward a conversation that could redraw lines I just promised myself not to cross.
Chapter 4
Power Play
Jason
Hotel curtains never keepthe city out. They just teach it to whisper. Neon leaks around the edges in bruised pinks and electric blues, the air conditioner huffs like a tired animal, and the bedside lamp throws a circle of gold that makes her skin look like something I should be arrested for wanting.
Citrus—that’s the first thing I remember, and the last thing I forget. Not sharp—warm. Like someone twisted a rind over ice and held the glass under my mouth. It lives under my tongue when I skate, in my throat when I try to sleep. Tonight, in the quiet of a suite that could fit my old apartment twice, it floods the room as if memory learned how to open doors.
Her laugh is in the pillow, the kind that starts near the teeth and slides down to the chest.You’re impossible, she’d said, which meant yes. My hands knew the map of her like I’d studied for this. Her hands knew the places on me that switched the lights from dim to dangerous. The sheet was a conspirator, caught between skin and heat, the sound of it a soft scrape that still raises every hair on my arms.
Deep breath, she’d told me—not like a trainer, like a thief picking the lock to my ribs. I’d obeyed because there are exactly three people in the universe I listen to without a fight, and she’s two of them. The third is a coach who believes in consequence.
There’s a frame of her in my head I can’t throw away: hair spilling like a dare, mouth flushed from kissing or laughing or both, one strap askew because I was bad at patience and worse at pretending I didn’t want. The world outside was sirens and taxi horns and a couple arguing about nothing they’d remember in the morning. Inside was the thud of my heart and the softer, syncopated sound of hers answering it.
