“Sit,” he said, pointing at the couch.
“Tanner—”
“Sit.”
I sat.
He worked in silence, arranging the ice against my shoulder, using the athletic tape to hold it in place over my shirt. His handswere steady, even though his jaw was tight. When he finished, he sat beside me—close, but not touching—and handed me the ibuprofen.
“Take three.”
I dry-swallowed them. Hated the waxy taste but didn’t want to ask for water and risk breaking whatever this was.
“This time,” Tanner said after a long silence. “You came home.”
“I always come home.”
“You don’t know that. You can’t promise that.”
“No. But I can promise I’m going to try.”
He was quiet. I watched his hands curl into fists on his knees, then release. Curl, release.
“I watched the game.”
The words came out almost too quiet to hear. I went still.
“You what?”
“I watched the game. On my laptop. With the sound off because I couldn’t handle the commentary, but I watched.” He wasn’t looking at me. His eyes were fixed on the ice pack, on his hand holding it in place. “I saw the hit. Saw you go down. And for about thirty seconds I thought?—”
He stopped. Shook his head.
“What did you think?” I asked.
“That I’d made a mistake. That pushing you away was the stupidest thing I’d ever done, and if you were hurt badly, I’dnever forgive myself for not—” His voice cracked. “For wasting the last week avoiding you when I could have just been here.”
Something in my chest loosened. “Tanner?—”
“But then you got up. And you stayed in the game. And I watched you take two more hits before you finally scored, and I realized—” He turned to look at me. His eyes were wet. “I can’t do this. I can’t sit here and watch you get hurt and pretend it doesn’t affect me. But I also can’t keep avoiding you. It’s making everything worse.”
I reached for him with my good arm, gripping his shoulder. He didn’t pull away.
“I’m not asking you to be okay with it,” I said. “I’m just asking you to stop shutting me out.”
“What if I can’t handle it? What if every time you come home hurt, I—” He gestured vaguely, frustrated.
“Then you patch me up and yell at me for being reckless. Like you’re doing now.”
His breath hitched. After a long moment, he met my eyes. “I don’t know how to do this. How to watch someone I care about put themselves in danger every week.”
“You don’t have to watch. I never asked you to.” I let my hand slide from his shoulder to the back of his neck, felt him shiver. “I just need you to stop disappearing on me. The silent treatment this week was worse than any hit I took tonight.”
His expression shifted. “You made stupid decisions out there. That last hit— You shouldn’t have gone back in.”
“It was the end of the game. I wasn’t about to leave our chances of winning up to someone else when Marcus and I were on fire.”
“You could have gotten hurt worse.”
