Sienna reached for her coffee and realised her hand was trembling. Barely perceptible, the slightest vibration in her fingertips, but she felt it. She wrapped both hands around the cup and held on.
"Thank you for this," Elise said. Her voice had gone quiet again, but it was a different kind of quiet now. Warm. "For bringing me here. For telling me about the tennis. For just... talking to me like a person instead of a patient."
"You are a person."
"I know. But sometimes I forget." Elise held her gaze, direct and searching, and Sienna let herself be seen.
It was terrifying. Being seen by Elise Moreno, without the shield of a medical chart or a professional title or the safe distance she'd maintained for twenty years with every woman who'd ever made her pulse quicken. Elise was looking at her across a café table in the late morning sun and seeing her, not Dr. Park, not the Valkyries' physician, but Sienna. The woman who swam in the ocean and folded napkins and had once been a tennis player with a dream that broke.
"We should head back," Sienna said, because if she sat here any longer she was going to say words she couldn't take back. "I have an appointment at one."
"Right." Elise straightened, and her face fell for half a second before she caught it. "Thanks, Doc."
"Sienna."
The word was out of her mouth before she'd decided to say it. Elise's eyes widened, just slightly, and the corner of her mouth curved upward.
"Thanks, Sienna."
Her name in Elise's mouth was everything it had been in the text at midnight, warm and intimate and too close to what she wanted, and Sienna stood up and gathered her things and walked out of Lavender's into the sunshine with Elise beside her and her pulse pounding against her ribs.
They walked back to the stadium in silence that was full of things neither of them said. Their arms brushed once, at the corner where the waterfront path turned back toward thestadium, and neither of them moved away. A seagull cried overhead.
And Sienna looked at Elise's profile, the sun full on her face now, the strong jaw and the dark lashes and the mouth that was trying not to smile, and she thought: I am not going to survive this.
8
ELISE
Elise woke up thinking about Sienna's hands.
Not in any way she could defend to a reasonable person, but there it was. The alarm had gone off at six-thirty, the grey light of early morning pressing through her curtains, and before she'd even rolled over or registered the ache in her shoulder or remembered what day it was, her brain had served up the image of Sienna's fingers on her scapula during yesterday's session, warm and certain, guiding her arm through its range of motion. The memory lived in her muscles. The ghost of it lingered on her skin, the pressure of each fingertip, and it was doing things to her pulse rate that had nothing to do with the anti-inflammatories she'd forgotten to take.
She showered, dressed, ate a protein bar standing at the kitchen counter because she still hadn't managed to master the art of cooking one-handed, and drove to the stadium with the windows down and the radio playing a song she didn't hear.
The corridors were quiet at this hour. Training didn't start for another forty minutes and the facility had the empty, echoing quality of a building waiting to fill up. Her trainers squeaked against the polished floor. The gym was dark through the glassdoors. The team lounge was locked. Somewhere deep in the building, the ventilation system hummed, and the distant clang of someone stacking equipment in the storage room carried through the walls.
She was early. She knew she was early. Her session with Sienna wasn't until eight-thirty and it was barely eight, and there was no medical reason for her to be speed-walking down the corridor toward the medical suite with her gym bag bouncing against her good shoulder and her stomach flipping.
She wanted to see Sienna. That was the truth of it, stripped of every excuse she'd been constructing since yesterday. Not because of the rehab or the shoulder or the professional obligation. Because yesterday at Lavender's, Sienna had told her about the tennis career and the ankle and the dream that broke, and she'd looked at Elise across the café table and said "you were never a lost cause," and Elise had carried those words home like a talisman, turning them over in her mind before she fell asleep.
And then this morning, the hands.
She slowed as she reached Medical. The door was closed. She knocked twice and heard Sienna's voice call "come in" from inside, and she pushed through the door with what she hoped was a casual expression that said "I'm here for my regularly scheduled appointment and definitely not twenty-five minutes early because I wanted to see you."
Sienna was at her desk, typing notes on her laptop. She turned when the door opened and her face went through a quick, complicated sequence that Elise was becoming an expert at reading: professional neutrality, then surprise, then pleasure, then the careful suppression of the pleasure back into neutrality. All of it in about half a second. Sienna was wearing a dark green blouse today, silk, with the sleeves rolled to her elbows, and her glasses caught the overhead light when she tilted her head.
"You're early."
"I'm keen." She leaned against the doorframe with what she hoped was a casual shrug.
"You're very keen. You're twenty-five minutes keen."
Elise dropped her bag inside the door. "I'm a model patient. We established this."
The corner of Sienna's mouth curved upward. She closed her laptop and stood. "How's the shoulder this morning?"
"Stiff. But the pain's better. I'm down to a three most of the day."
