Sienna crossed the room to the treatment bed and pulled the curtain back, a habit she maintained even when there was no one else in the suite. "Let's take a look. Top off, please."
Elise set her bag by the door and pulled her zip-up over her head. The sling made undressing a production, a clumsy one-armed negotiation with fabric that used to take two seconds, and by the time she was down to her sports bra, she'd twisted the zip-up inside out and the sleeves were tangled around her sling straps. She tossed it onto the chair with the grace of a cat falling off a shelf.
Sienna was watching. Not in the professional way, where her eyes tracked the injury site and assessed the range of motion and noted the clinical data. In a different way. Her gaze moved across Elise's collarbone, down the line of her shoulders, across the exposed skin above her sports bra, and then caught itself. Colour bloomed on her cheeks, quick and vivid, and she looked away, adjusting her glasses with a gesture Elise was starting to recognise as a tell. Whenever Sienna was flustered, her hand went to her glasses.
Elise sat on the treatment bed and said nothing. She didn't need to. The blush on Sienna's cheeks was saying plenty, and the heat rising up Elise's own neck was saying the rest.
"Right." Sienna stepped closer, her expression resettled into professional calm. "Let me check the joint." Her fingers foundthe shoulder, pressing along the anterior capsule, testing the swelling. The bruise had faded further since last week, a pale yellow smudge across the deltoid that was barely visible now.
Every place Sienna touched, Elise's skin lit up. It wasn't pain. It was the opposite of pain, a current that ran from the point of contact through her chest and down into her stomach, insistent. Sienna's thumb pressed into the soft tissue above her clavicle and Elise's breath stuttered, just slightly, and she locked her jaw to keep from making a sound.
"External rotation." Sienna cradled Elise's elbow with one hand and placed the other flat against her scapula. The palm was warm through the sports bra strap, each finger distinct. She guided Elise's arm outward with slow, steady control, and Sienna's breath warmed her shoulder, close enough to stir the fine hairs on her skin.
"That's much better than last week," Sienna said. Her voice was steady but quieter than usual. "The laxity's decreasing. You're getting stronger."
"Must be the rehab gym work.”
Sienna's mouth twitched. She rotated Elise's arm into flexion, then abduction, her fingers adjusting with each position. When she moved into the apprehension test, the position that had made Elise tense up last time, Elise braced for the flare of anxiety, but Sienna's grip was so secure and her hands were so warm that the fear didn't come. Instead, she sat on the treatment bed in her sports bra with Sienna Park's hands on her body and let herself feel all of it. The electricity. The want. The steady, deepening pull toward this woman who touched her with such care that it made her chest ache.
"How are you feeling?" Sienna asked, stepping back to make notes on her tablet. The question wasn't about the shoulder. Or maybe it was. With Sienna, the clinical and the personalbled together in ways that were getting harder to separate. "Generally, I mean. Beyond the rehab."
Elise pulled her knees up on the treatment bed and wrapped her good arm around them. The medical suite was quiet. The antiseptic smell of the room was undercut by Sienna's perfume, clean and subtle, the same scent she'd caught at Lavender's yesterday.
"Honestly?"
"Always."
"Low." The word came out flat. She hadn't meant to say it that plainly, but Sienna was looking at her with those dark, steady eyes and Elise didn't have the energy to perform fine. "I'm really low, Sienna. The shoulder's getting better and I know the rehab is working and I should be grateful for that, but the rest of it..." She trailed off. Through the medical suite wall, the facility was waking up. Footsteps in the corridor. The slam of a locker door. Someone laughing. "The other players are great. They text me, they check in, they tell me they miss me. But they've got games and training and team dinners and all the things I used to be part of, and I'm standing on the outside watching it through a window."
She hadn't said any of this to anyone. Not to Lou, who'd called her twice this week with practical, kind check-ins that somehow made her feel worse. Not to Frankie, who'd stopped by her apartment with a six-pack and a card game and spent the evening carefully not talking about hockey. Not to her mother, who'd called from California and asked if she was eating properly and told her to rest. They all cared. She knew they cared. But none of them understood how fundamentally wrong it felt to be separated from the thing that defined her, as if someone had removed a load-bearing wall and expected the structure to hold.
Sienna set the tablet down. She pulled the stool from beneath the counter and sat on it, close to the treatment bed, her knees almost touching the edge where Elise sat.
"That isolation is normal," Sienna said. "It doesn't make it easier, but it's a recognised part of the injury process. Athletes tie their identity to their sport, and when the sport is taken away, the identity fractures. What you're describing isn't weakness. It's grief."
"Grief."
"For the version of yourself that's temporarily missing. The player, the teammate, the person who belongs in that locker room. She's coming back. But right now, she's gone, and that hurts."
Elise's throat closed. She pressed her lips together and looked at the ceiling, the acoustic tiles and the vent that needed cleaning, because if she kept looking at Sienna she was going to cry.
The word hit harder than she was prepared for. Grief. She'd been calling it frustration, calling it boredom, calling it the natural impatience of an athlete sidelined. Calling it grief made it real. Made it bigger than a shoulder injury and a rehab timeline and the number of weeks until she could lace up her skates again. She pressed her thumbnail into her palm beneath the sling, the sharp crescent of it grounding her.
"Nobody else gets it," Elise said. "My friends are trying, but they're still in it. They've got the next game and the next training session and the next road trip, and I'm sitting in my apartment eating takeaway for the third night in a row watching highlights on my phone. They can't see what this is like from the inside because they've never been on the outside."
Sienna's hands were still in her lap. "I have."
Two words. Quiet, without weight or drama, but Elise looked down from the ceiling and met Sienna's gaze and saw it:the recognition. Not sympathy, not pity, not the well-meaning but hollow "I'm sure it'll be fine" that everyone else offered. Recognition. Sienna knew what this felt like because she'd lived it. The tennis career, the broken ankle, the six months in a boot watching other players take her place. She had stood on the outside of her own life and watched it move on without her, and that shared wound was more comforting than anything Lou or Frankie or her mother had said in three weeks.
Elise swallowed hard. "Thank you. For actually hearing me."
Sienna held her gaze. The medical suite was very quiet. "Anytime."
The moment stretched between them. Then Elise cleared her throat and pulled her zip-up back on, one-armed and awkward again, and the mood shifted back toward ground she could stand on.
"Come over to mine tonight," she said. "For dinner."
The words came out with more confidence than she felt. She'd been thinking about it since yesterday, since the walk back from Lavender's when their arms had brushed and neither of them had moved away. She wanted more of that. More of the conversation and the ease and the way Sienna made her feel seen instead of broken.
