Page 4 of Puck My Pain Away

I close the folder.

I don’t call anyone. I tell myself the truth I always tell myself, which is that I am the most careful clinician this franchise has ever employed, that no one will watch this boy more closely than I will. Both halves of that are true. That is the trick of it, that is how a thing like me stays invisible. The danger isn’t that I’ll be careless with Roman Vane.

The danger is exactly how careful I’m going to be.

—

In the morning, I clear the room before he’s even discharged from observation.

Blake Fox, the team physio, catches me at the board where the rehab assignments live, the little magnetic names under each athlete. I’m already pulling the two assistant trainers off Vane’s column, sliding their tags down to other men.

“You’re stripping his whole team,” she says.

“I’m consolidating it.” I move the last tag. Roman’s column has one name under it now. Mine. “He’s a complex case. Comorbid risk factors. He doesn’t need four people with four philosophies; he needs one program run without contradiction.”

Blake folds her arms. She’s compact and quick. The players trust her, which means she’s the most dangerous person in this building to me. She doesn’t know that yet, and I intend to keep it that way. “Comorbid risk factors,” she repeats. “You read the drinking note.”

“I read the whole file.”

“Then you know he shouldn’t be on a long opioid course without somebody besides the guy writing it keeping an eye on the dose.” She says it plainly, no accusation in it, just a good clinician doing her job, and that’s what makes the back of my neck go cool. “I can have my people track his meds independently. Standard practice. Takes nothing off your plate.”

“I’ll be tracking it myself. Daily.” I hold out my hand for the dosage charts she’s holding, the ones she brought down to have this conversation. “Closely. More closely than a shared spreadsheet ever would.”

She doesn’t hand them over right away. She looks at me, and there’s something in her face that isn’t suspicion yet, just a question she can’t fully form, the animal sense good people get around men like me a long time before they have any evidence. I hold her eyes and give her nothing, because nothing is what I have always given, and after a moment she puts the charts in my hand.

“Okay,” she says. “Your case.” But she watches me walk away. I feel it the whole length of the corridor, and I file it, as I file everything: Blake Fox, noted, a thread to keep from being pulled.

—

I save the patient himself for last, the one part of the day I actually want.

His room’s too warm, and it smells of the cheap antiseptic they use on the recovery floor. He’s sitting up against the pillows when I come in. And I’ll grant the marketing department this much: even wrecked, even grey under the eyes with three days of beard and his hair grown out of its sponsor cut, Roman Vane is something to look at. The shoulders fill the bed. The jaw is a thing they put on billboards. And the eyes that come up to meet mine are hazel going green at the edges and absolutely furious to be seen like this, which interests me more than the rest of it combined, because fury is just fear that hasn’t found a wall to break itself against, and I have spent my life being the wall.

He decides, in the half-second it takes me to reach the bed, to charm me.

I watch him do it. I watch the grin come up from somewhere, the easy one, the one that’s gotten him out of every room he ever wanted out of, and he says, “So you’re the miracle worker. They keep telling me you don’t lose. No pressure,” and the grin widens, an invitation to like him, to be charmed, to become one more person who wants the golden boy to be okay.

“Lie back,” I say. “Brace off. I want to see the joint.”

The grin holds a second past where it should and then I watch it cost him to keep up. I unwrap the knee. The swelling’s down enough to read the wreckage under it. I put my hands on him, find the joint line, the points where the structure’s gone. He flinches and bites it down, because he won’t give me the flinch, not this one. I note that too. He’ll give pain a fight. Good. That tells me how much the relief will be worth to him when it comes.

I press along the joint line, mapping it by feel. His breath shortens and catches. He holds it rather than make a sound. Sweat stands out at his hairline. His hands have gone to fists on the blanket, knuckles white. He keeps them there, keeps his eyes on the ceiling, doing the thing he’s done his whole life with everything that hurts, which is to wall it off and wait for it to be over. I could stop. The exam doesn’t strictly require I go this deep today. I go this deep today anyway, because I need to know what his pain looks like before any drug of mine ever touches it, what his face does, where his limit sits, so that later I’ll know to the milligram what I’m giving back to him. He thinks I’m being thorough. I am being thorough. That’s always been the cover and the truth at once.

“Breathe,” I tell him, not gently, just an instruction. To my mild interest he does, lets the held breath go on my word, and the fists ease a fraction. He doesn’t even notice he obeyed. I notice. I file that too.

When the charm doesn’t land, he goes the other way. They always do.

“You always this warm with your patients?” he says, and there’s a blade in it now. “Or am I special? You strip my trainers off the board, you don’t say one word about whether I’m gonna skate again, you just— what, manhandle the knee and stare? I’ve had vets with better fucking bedside manner.”

“Your ACL and MCL are both compromised and your medial meniscus has a radial tear that’s the actual reason no one will give you a date.” I keep going through the exam while I say it, flat, not unkind, just true. “You’ll have two surgeries. You’ll spend the next several months in this building with me. Whether you skate at your prior level depends on things I can’t promise and a few things I can, and the difference between the two is going to come down almost entirely to how well you do exactly what I tell you, exactly when I tell you. That’s your bedside manner. That’s all of it.”

He stares at me. The venom’s still up but something’s moved behind it, and I know what it is because I’ve seen it in every difficult man I’ve ever fixed: the small, appalled relief of finally meeting someone who won’t be moved. He’s spent three days being handled gently by people terrified of his despair. I’m the first person in the room who isn’t afraid of it. Who looks at the wreck of him and doesn’t blink.

“You don’t care if I like you,” he says slowly, like he’s reading it off my face.

“No.”

And there it is. The grin’s gone now, entirely. What’s left is the actual man underneath, younger than twenty-five and badly frightened. He looks at me like I’ve been looked at exactly a handful of times in my life, the look that has always, every time, been the beginning of the end for the person giving it. Like I’m solid ground. Like I’m the one fixed thing in a room that’s been spinning for three days.