“Morning, Cap,” she said, walking in without waiting for an invitation. “Pre-game check. You know the drill.”
Tess had been the Wolves' Head Athletic Trainer for longer than I'd been captain, and she knew every player's body well enough to spot tension, injury, or bullshit from across a room. She was good at her job in ways that went beyond just patching people up after hits, and I trusted her more than I trusted most people in my life.
I sat down on the edge of the bed and let her run through the standard checks—range of motion in my shoulders, flexibility in my hips, pressure points along my spine that would tell her if I was carrying tension I hadn't admitted to yet. I'd done this enough times that it should have felt routine.
Except Tess had a way of reading me that went deeper than muscle and bone.
“You're tight through here,” she said, pressing between my shoulder blades hard enough to make me wince. “When's the last time you relaxed?”
“I'm fine.”
“That's not what I asked.” She moved to check my neck, fingers digging into the knots that had taken up permanent residence there. “You carrying an injury you haven't told me about?”
“No.”
“Then what's got you this tense on game day?” Her voice went quieter, more careful. “This isn't pre-game nerves. This is your head eating you alive and your body trying to keep up.”
I didn't answer right away, because admitting that my brain was a fucking mess felt like weakness I couldn't afford. Tess had seen me at my worst before, knew things about my past thatmost people didn't, and the fact that she was asking meant she'd already clocked that I was spiraling.
She'd been there during the worst of it with my ex. Had seen bruises I'd explained away too easily, had noticed the way I'd flinched when people moved too fast near me, had eventually put the pieces together in ways that had forced me to admit out loud that the relationship I'd been in was destroying me from the inside out. She'd helped me document everything when I'd finally gotten out, had made sure I had medical records that proved what had happened, and she'd never once made me feel like less of a man for staying as long as I had.
“I'm just distracted,” I said finally, because that was close enough to the truth without opening doors I didn't want to walk through right now.
“Distracted by what?”
“Personal shit. Nothing that's going to affect the game.”
Tess pulled back and came around to face me, arms crossed in a way that meant she wasn't buying what I was selling. “Rook. Look at me.”
I met her eyes, and the concern I saw there made my chest tighten.
“Is this about her?” she asked quietly. “Your ex? Is she trying to contact you again?”
“No. God, no.” The denial came out fast. “I haven't heard from her in years. This isn't about that.”
“Then what is it about?”
I could have lied. But Tess had earned honesty from me in ways most people hadn't, and the exhaustion of carrying everything alone was starting to wear me down.
“There's this guy,” I said, and the words felt awkward and too vulnerable. “Old friend from high school. We reconnected recently, and it's complicated, and I can't stop thinking about him even when I need to be focused on hockey.”
“Complicated how?”
“He's got a lot going on. Family shit, money problems, a drinking issue he won't admit is a problem. And I'm trying to help, but I don't know if I'm making things better or just getting in too deep with a situation I don't know how to fix.”
“Does he make you feel unsafe?” The question was careful, deliberate, and I could hear all the weight of my history sitting underneath it.
“No. Nothing like that.” I rubbed at my face with both hands, trying to organize my thoughts into coherent sentences. “He makes me feel—I don't know. Grounded, when I'm with him. Like I'm more myself than I've been in a long time. But he's also a fucking disaster who needs help I don't know how to give, and I'm scared that if I don't figure it out fast enough he's going to spiral into worse shit than he's already dealing with.”
Tess was quiet for a long moment, and I could see her processing what I'd said against everything she knew about my past and how badly I'd been hurt the last time I'd tried to save anyone.
“You can't fix people who don't want to be fixed,” she said finally. “You know that, right? You can support them, you can be there when they ask for help, but you can't carry their recovery for them.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because the last time you got involved with someone who needed saving, it damn near destroyed you. I'm not watching you do that again. Not for anyone.”
“This is different.” I said it with more certainty than I felt, because Soren wasn't my ex and the situations weren't remotely comparable except for the part where I was getting emotionally invested in ways that scared the shit out of me. “Soren's not dangerous. He's just hurting, and I want to help.”
