Sienna smoothed the skin prep with her thumb. "You're going to be brilliant."
"What if I'm not?"
"Then you'll be good, and good is more than enough for a first game back." Sienna tore a strip of tape and began applying it in overlapping lines across Elise's shoulder joint, the familiar lattice pattern she'd developed over weeks of rehabilitation. Her hands were steady. They were always steady when she was working. "I've watched you in the gym this week. Your movement is strong. Your reactions are sharp. Your conditioning is better than it was before the injury because Kylie worked you harder than any game would."
"Kylie is a sadist."
"Kylie is very good at her job." Sienna smoothed the last strip of tape and pressed it firmly into place. She rested her hand on Elise's shoulder and felt the solid heat of it, the muscle and bone and repaired tissue beneath her palm. "You're ready, Elise. I wouldn't have cleared you if you weren't."
Elise looked at her. The nervousness was still there, but beneath it was trust. Absolute, steady trust in Sienna's judgment. It settled on Sienna's shoulders and she bore it gladly.
"Thank you," Elise said. "For all of it. Not just the tape."
Sienna held the scissors still for a moment. "You don't need to thank me."
"I'll always thank you." Elise held her gaze a second too long, past professional and not quite into suspicious. Her eyes were steady. Whatever nerves lived behind them were held in check by trust, and it settled in Sienna's chest. Eight weeks ago, Elise had been furious about being pulled from a game. Now she was sitting on the same treatment bed letting Sienna tape hershoulder and looking at her as if Sienna had given her back more than just her playing career.
Elise pulled on her jersey and stood. She paused at the door. "See you out there, Doc."
"Go. Before I tape your mouth shut."
The grin that crossed Elise's face was bright and sudden and gone as she ducked through the door. Sienna stood in the empty medical room with the scent of adhesive tape and Elise's coconut shampoo and her own heart beating too fast for someone who was supposed to be the professional in the building.
The arena was full. Not capacity, not for a mid-season Thursday game, but full enough that the noise was constant, a wall of sound that rose and fell with the play. Sienna sat in her usual seat at the end of the team bench, her medical bag at her feet, and watched.
Lex was playing brilliantly. The first period belonged to her, every shift electric, her speed and power creating chances that the opposition couldn't contain. She scored once, a wrist shot from the top of the circle that beat the goalie clean, and the arena erupted. Sienna watched the replay on the big screen and admitted, privately, that it was beautiful.
The second period opened and Mara made the call. Sienna heard it through the headset that connected the bench to the coaching staff.
"Moreno. You're on."
Elise stood up from the bench. Her jaw was tight and her hands were gripping her stick with white-knuckled intensity. She glanced at Sienna. One look. Brief and loaded and private in the crowded arena.
Sienna nodded. Just once.
Elise stepped onto the ice.
She was different immediately. Not better or worse than Lex, but different. Where Lex was explosive and unpredictable, Elise was fluid and intelligent, her movement a constant recalibration of angle and position that opened the ice for her linemates. She won her first faceoff cleanly. Her first touch was a crisp pass to Frankie that started a breakout. Her positioning was instinctive, years of experience overriding eight weeks of absence.
Sienna's hands were clasped in her lap and her knuckles were white and she was not breathing.
Elise played ten minutes in the second period and was magnificent. Not flashy, not highlight-reel, but solid, intelligent hockey that coaches built systems around. She won faceoffs. She made smart passes. She tracked back on defence with discipline and covered spaces that Lex never bothered to cover because covering spaces wasn't glamorous and Elise didn't need glamorous. She needed useful.
She came off the ice at the end of the second period. The other players banged their sticks against the boards as she passed, the universal hockey salute, and Lou caught her arm, grinning, and Elise grinned back. She was breathing hard, her face flushed, her ponytail damp with sweat, and her eyes were shining and the joy on her face was wild and pure, a woman who had been given back the thing she loved.
Sienna's throat ached. She'd been steady through the entire second period, hands clasped, watching from the bench, and then Elise smiled and all of it gave way.
She came down the bench and the grin on her face was wide and uninhibited and the most beautiful thing Sienna had ever seen in this arena or anywhere else. Sweat darkened the hair at her temples. Her chest was heaving from the exertion. She looked alive. Completely, radiantly alive, as she'd looked in thecove at sunrise but multiplied, amplified, because this was Elise in her element, Elise doing the thing she was born to do, and the eight weeks of fear and isolation had burned away in ten minutes of ice time.
Sienna stood. She didn't think about it. She didn't weigh the professional implications or consider who was watching or calculate the risk. She opened her arms and Elise walked into them and Sienna held her, right there on the bench, in front of the team and the cameras and the arena, and Elise's sweaty jersey pressed against Sienna's polo and Elise's arms wrapped around her waist and they held each other.
"You were incredible," Sienna whispered against her hair.
"I'm back," Elise said. Her voice broke on the word.
Lavender's was quiet on a Thursday evening. The pale purple walls and whitewashed furniture looked different in the evening light, softer, more intimate. Lavender was behind the bar, her silver-streaked dark hair loose, and she'd waved them in with a knowing smile and put them at the window table, the one they'd sat at the first time they came here together, back when they were still pretending it was just coffee between a doctor and her patient.
They weren't pretending anymore.
