"Hi." Sienna's voice was rough with sleep. She blinked again. Her hand came up to her face as if reaching for glasses that weren't there, and then she stopped, fingers hovering in the air, and her expression changed. She was remembering. It showed in the slight shift of her focus, her pupils changing, recognition returning piece by piece.
Sienna's cheeks flushed. The colour started at her jaw and spread upward, pink and deep, visible even in the grey morning light.
"How are you feeling?" Elise asked.
"I..." Sienna pushed herself up on one elbow. The sheet slipped further and she caught it against her chest with her free hand, holding it there. The modesty of it, after everything they'd done last night, made Elise ache with tenderness. "I can't believe what happened."
"Which part?"
"All of it. Every part." Sienna's voice was steady but her eyes were not. They searched Elise's face with an intensity that bordered on frantic, looking for cues, reading the room as she read medical charts, seeking information that would tell her how to proceed. "I crossed a professional boundary. Several professional boundaries. I am your physician and I slept with you and that is a serious violation of my ethical obligations."
"You're a sports medicine physician in a hockey programme, not a neurosurgeon operating on my brain," Elise said. "And we're both adults who chose to be here. Nobody violated anything."
"There are professional standards that exist for very good reasons."
Elise rolled onto her side, propping her head on her hand. "And those standards are about protecting vulnerable patients from predatory doctors. You're not exploiting me and I'm not vulnerable. I am, in fact, spectacularly fine." Elise let the word hang there, inflected with just enough suggestion that it carried both meanings, and watched Sienna's blush deepen.
Sienna pulled her knees up beneath the sheet. "That's not how the ethics board would see it."
"Lucky I'm not dating the ethics board."
Sienna stared at her. The colour had reached her collarbones, disappearing beneath the edge of the sheet she was clutching. Her hair was a mess and her eyes were swollen from last night's crying and there was a pillow crease on her left cheek and she was the most beautiful thing Elise had ever seen in this bed or any bed.
"Was that the best compliment you've ever received from someone holding a sheet over her chest?" Elise asked.
Sienna pressed a hand to her neck. "Stop it."
"You're gorgeous when you blush. Which is convenient because you blush every time I look at you."
"I do not." Sienna pulled the sheet higher, which only made Elise grin wider.
Elise reached over and traced a finger along Sienna's collarbone, just above the sheet's edge. "You're doing it right now. Your neck is red. It's incredibly hot."
Sienna pressed her lips together, fighting a smile and losing. The smile broke through her reserve and transformed her face, softened all the edges, and Elise's chest ached at the sight of it because this was Sienna without armour and she was luminous.
"I need to tell you this," Sienna said. The smile faded, replaced by a seriousness that made Elise's stomach tighten. She braced for it. The regret speech. The morning-after pullback. The professional-distance reassertion that would take Sienna back behind her walls and leave Elise standing on the wrong side.
"Okay."
"Last night was the best sex of my entire life."
The sentence filled the quiet bedroom. Elise blinked.
"And I realise that's not saying much," Sienna continued, "because the bar was underground. But I need you to know that what you did to me last night was not just good. It was revelatory. I didn't know my body could do that. I didn't know Icould feel that. And I am furious at every woman who touched me before you because they made me think the problem was me."
"The problem was never you," Elise said. Her voice came out rougher than she intended.
"I know that now." Sienna looked at the sheet in her hand, then back at Elise. "Because of you."
Elise wanted to kiss her. She wanted to cross the six inches of mattress between them and put her mouth on Sienna's and taste the morning on her lips. But she held back. Not from uncertainty. From care. This moment was fragile and Sienna was fragile and Elise was not going to be the person who pushed too fast.
"I can do it again," she said instead, and let the offer settle between them in the morning quiet.
Sienna's breath caught. The sound was small, almost inaudible, but Elise heard it because she was listening for it, because she was tuned to every frequency of Sienna's body now, every micro-expression and tiny sound. Sienna's pupils dilated. Her fingers tightened on the sheet.
"I want to do it again," Sienna said. "But I want..." She stopped. Swallowed. Her skin flushed again, darker this time, the heat of a woman forcing words out that she'd never spoken. "I want to do it to you."
Elise's breath left her in a rush. "To me?"
