My whole body hummed with the aftershock of an imaginary execution and now also a new, unprecedented threat.
And for the first time all day, the only thing louder than the arena behind me was the truth I’d been avoiding.
Theo wasn’t getting better.
And every lie I’d told had just locked me deeper into the problem.
9
Theo
“How’s it looking, Doc?” No answer. She hadn’t said much after telling me to lie down on the exam table. “I’ve been feeling a lo—”
The subtle change in pressure on my shoulder shut me up immediately. Then her weight shifted and suddenly she wasn’t standing beside the table anymore.
I bit my tongue as she climbed up onto the table, my words vanishing the second her knee landed across my hip. Straddling me. My brain pitched and scrambled to process the proximity, the warmth of her body against mine. Jesus.
Every sarcastic remark stalled in me. There was nothing more than the blinding awareness of it. The steady balance of her thighs, the pressure of her hands. The table creaked beneath us as she moved.
“Needed a better angle, sorry,” she muttered under her breath.
Her thumbs pressed into my deltoid, holding the muscle firm. Then the tape unrolled with a loud rip and slid across my skin. She worked without words or fuss, her precision tugging at the constant ache in my joint until it flared in protest at the correction.
“You’re not gonna be able to fake it for much longer.” Her breath brushed my neck, and I flinched. A fraction of a shift that betrayed the tiny spike of tension coiling in my gut.
“Hopper…”
But she didn’t know how hard I was fighting to keep control, so ignored the start of my objection. Her hands moved along the tape, circling, anchoring. I could feel the gentle pull of her fingers as they adjusted, pressing the strip down along the line she’d drawn every other time, the one that kept my joint from losing its shit during body checks.
“I don’t have to tell you this isn’t healing up the way it should.” More pressure, and this time it was curious instead of probing. It was as if I could hear the cogs in her brain clicking over.
She was right—an annoying habit of hers I was coming to not like so much. But I didn’t want to hear it.
“I’m fine,” I said, trying to mask the spike of heat in my shoulder. My teeth ground against it. “Stronger than ever, actually. Shoulder’s holding.”
Her incredulous silence made me want to roll out of her grasp just to prove a point. I felt her unmoving stare burn into the back of my skull, sure that if I turned around, the look in her eyes would floor me.
“Every game just adds to the damage,” she said, readying another strip. “Without a scan, there’s no way to tell what we’re working with.”
I’d survived worse than this, taken shifts that would have left someone else limping off the ice. I’d held myself together while the team floundered last season, felt the weight of every goal scored against us like a chain around my ribs. I could handle this. I had to handle this.
“Scan, my ass.”
Her thighs squeezed tighter, and I lost the thread of my thought over the faint brush of her chest above me. Why the hell did she have to do that? This was hard enough without having her heartbeat thrumming against my back.
The answer came a second later, when a searing pain shot through my arm right down to my fingertips.
“See?” Because of course she noticed it. There was no getting anything past this one. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about.”
“I said I’m fine,” I repeated, this time with more force behind the words to make my tone match my insistence. “I’m not some kid who needs to be micromanaged, thanks.”
She huffed an impatient sigh, and rocked back so her chest no longer wreaked havoc with me. “Honesty, Bouchard. That was the first rule. Total honesty. You can’t just will your shoulder back to full function because it’s convenient.”
I let the words simmer, kept my jaw tight. “I’m being honest, okay? You’re just paranoid. I can feel it holding. It’s fine.”
“You’ve been feeling ‘fine’ since last season. And look where it got you.” She pressed a little more, just enough to anchor my upper arm, to keep the joint aligned. My body reacted despite my fight for calm, hand clenching the edge of the table. I gripped the vinyl like it could tether me to a reality where I wasn’t in pain.
I hated it. Hated that she saw too much. That I couldn’t respond without sounding weak. Also that she insisted on pushing buttons that didn’t need pushing.
