Exactly what I asked for.
Exactly what I should not want too badly.
Which means they have already decided what they want me to see.
Ryan
Iam still stretching when Silas Vane’s text comes in.
Upstairs. Now.
Urgent. Context-free.
Management loves urgency when they are not the ones bleeding for it.
I finish the stretch anyway.
The bruise on my shin has darkened since morning skate. I press two fingers beside it and decide it is not worth anyone else’s opinion.
Routine first.
Always.
“You hiding that from Maren?” Roman Keene asks from the next mat.
“It is a bruise.”
“It is a color I have only seen on weather maps.”
Across the training room, Dr. Maren Ellis sets down the tape, tells Zach to keep the wrist still, and crosses the floor toward me.She does not hurry. She never hurries. Hurrying would suggest the players set the schedule.
She crouches at my shin and presses the edge of the bruise with two fingers, no permission asked.
I do not move.
The training room is the one place my authority does not travel. In here she outranks the letter on my chest, she knows it, and she is decent enough not to enjoy it where the room can watch.
“Tell me when it changes,” she says.
“It is not going to change.”
She presses lower, and there it is — the bright line of it I have been pretending costs nothing. My breath catches for half a second. She watches the breath, not my face.
“There,” she says. “That is the part you planned to skip.”
“It is a bruise,” I say again.
“It is a bruise today.” She rolls the sock down, studies the swelling, rolls it back up with more care than the injury has earned. “Bruises are honest. It is the men attached to them I have to read.”
“You have read me wrong before.”
“I read your shoulder in March exactly right. You called it fine. You missed four games calling it fine.” She does not look up. “I have a long memory and a longer file.”
Maren does not get managed. Players have learned that. So has management. So have I.
“I am playing tonight.”
“I did not say you weren’t.” She stays crouched, which keeps me sitting, which is the point. “You ice it twenty minutes after your meeting. And you tell me if it stiffens by the third — out loud, to me, not to the inside of your own head where I cannot reach it.”
