The door was closed. A thin line of light showed underneath. She was in there, waiting, and I was out here pretending I didn’t know exactly what was about to happen.
She was going to show me myself. This wouldn’t be the version I showed the team or the version the organization had decided was worth trading for. This would be the real me, the one I’d been trying not to look at since the injury.
I knocked twice.
Footsteps approached from inside. The door opened and she stood there, backlit by her desk lamp, smaller than anyone hada right to be in a building full of orcs. She’d pulled her long hair back, and she wore the same hoodie she always did in this room, the one that swallowed her hands.
“Why are you wearing that?” I flicked the tassel-tie dangling from the hood she hadn’t pulled up.
She frowned and glanced down. “Oh. Unprofessional, right? But it gets cold in my office, so I keep it here when my fingers start feeling frozen. It’s that or a blanket.”
“Why is it cold?” I glared at the room in general. “You should be warm. Comfortable.”
She shrugged. “No idea. I’ve notified maintenance a number of times and they make adjustments, but it never gets much above sixty.” A shiver ran through her frame. “The hoodie helps.”
“It’s wrong,” I growled.
“You’re right, but this is how it is.” She glanced toward the clock on the wall. One minute before four. “Thank you for coming.”
“Yes.”
She stepped back, making space. “Come in.”
I crossed the threshold.
The difference registered in my chest. I’d stood outside this door and each time I hadn’t entered. Each time she hadn’t asked me to.
Now she had.
She closed the door behind me, the click of the latch too loud in the small space.
I took in the three monitors on the desk, the chair she’d dragged around from the front, and how little room there was for both of us to exist without overlapping.
The air conditioning worked too well. It was cold enough that I could see why she wore the hoodie. That didn’t make it right, however, and I was going to fix that.
She gestured to the chair she’d pulled up beside hers, and I sat. She scooted behind me to take her own seat, her body brushing my chair.
The arrangement put us closer than any professional setting required. Her shoulder was maybe a foot from mine. Less, if either of us leaned. She turned off the desk lamp, dimming the room except for the screens, and that made everything feel contained in a way that had nothing to do with actual walls.
“I pulled footage from the last three practices,” she said, her voice even. “And some sequences from your last season with your previous team. I thought it would be useful to compare.”
“Alright.”
She tapped something on the keyboard. The center monitor filled with footage from Tuesday’s scrimmage. Me, tracking a forward through the neutral zone, closing the gap. Then hesitating before the contact I should’ve welcomed. I had been protecting my left side without meaning to. The forward got past me and made a pass I should’ve cut off.
“Here,” she said, pointing at the screen. “You read it perfectly. Your positioning was exactly where it needed to be. But you retreated before contact.”
I watched myself make the mistake in real time again. “Yes.”
“It happens in every sequence I pulled from the last three practices. I see the same hesitation. You’re protecting your left side.” She pulled up another clip. “Here. And here.”
More footage played. I confirmed what she was showing me without saying a thing. How could I deny it when it was obviously true? My professionalism held, a thin container around something that felt less professional with every second we sat this close.
She leaned past me to point to the next sequence and her arm brushed across mine, an unavoidable thing in the small space. “This one’s different. You committed to the contact butcompensated afterward. You favored your right side through the rest of the shift.”
Her hands were small, and they moved in a precise way. Gesturing, pointing, pulling sequences with the ease of someone who’d done this hundreds of times. I couldn’t stop tracking them.
“You see it,” she said. Not a question.
