Page 16 of Offside

“Shirt off,” I said. Casual. Procedural. I used the same tone as when I’d said it to a half dozen other guys this week.

“Yeah.” He reached back, gathered the practice shirt at the collar, and pulled it over his head in one motion, and I had a thirty-second window of looking at Ryan Lindqvist with no shirt on while pretending I was looking at clinical landmarks. The shoulder. I was looking at the shoulder.

I was looking at all of it. Holy shit. His abs, his smooth skin, those biceps…I was about to die from sensory overload and I hadn’t even touched his shoulder. Shit. His shoulder. That’s right. Focus!

I’d seen his frame in compression gear on the bench, at my parents’ table, across a training room where my professional brain had clocked it and immediately filed it elsewhere. None of that had prepared me for him sitting on my treatment table at arm’s length with his shirt off. The long line of his back. The breadth of his shoulders, nine seasons of this built into every muscle. The scar through his left eyebrow. A small one near his collarbone I hadn’t seen before, half-faded, hockey probably. A faint trail of fair hair at his chest I refused to follow with my eyes any further than the absolute professional minimum.

He set the shirt on the table beside him. He was not looking at me. That was the giveaway. He was sitting on my treatment table with his shoulders set and his eyes on the wall and his hands flat on his thighs and waiting for me to start, and the stillness was doing the same thing it had done in my mother’s kitchen, which was begging me to acknowledge it.

I am a professional.

I cleared my throat. “Let me know if anything I do is uncomfortable or makes it worse.”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s check your mobility, okay?” I asked softly before putting my hands on him.

“Yeah, okay,” he replied quietly. I noticed the tic in his jaw and was almost relieved to find I wasn’t the only one affected.

I started with range of motion, standing in front of him, one hand at his wrist and one at his shoulder, guiding his arm through the arc. He was watching my face the way he seemed to watch everything. Steady, giving me his full attention. I kept my eyes on the joint and my mind on the assessment and not on the fact that only a few days ago I’d been close enough to his mouth in my mother’s kitchen I could have counted his eyelashes.

I was doing great.

Resistance testing next. I braced my palms against his forearm and asked him to push, feeling for the strength differential, the hesitation that meant something was compensating. His arm was solid against my hands, pushing back with controlled, deliberate force.

Palpation was where it got complicated.

I had to get close. Closer than I was, which was pretty fucking close. I stood beside him and pressed my thumbs into the tissue around the joint, mapping the tension, and he went still the same way he had in my mother’s kitchen. Completely, carefully still, like stillness was something he was doing on purpose.

“Tight here?” I pressed into the posterior capsule, just below the ridge of the joint.

He inhaled sharply. “Yeah.”

“And here?”

“Yeah.” Lower this time. Almost nothing.

“We need to keep an eye on this, especially now in the preseason. It could lead to rotator cuff problems, and the end result there is usually surgery, and nobody wants that.”

His gaze snapped to meet mine and his eyes widened and I felt his entire upper body stiffen.

“Relax,” I said softly. “We won’t let it get that bad.” I squeezed his shoulder gently, friendly, and he relaxed.

“Okay,” he said. Then a moment later, he added, “Thank you.”

“That’s what I’m here for. Now try to relax,” I said.

I worked along the muscle, slow and methodical. He exhaled through his nose and kept his eyes on the wall. His jaw was set. His free hand was flat on his thigh. I hadn’t touched anything that should have hurt yet. It was then I understood, suddenly and inconveniently, that I was not the only person in this room having a problem. He was working as hard as I was to ignore the thing happening between us.

I tucked it down and kept working, because again, I was a professional, and this was my job and the shoulder needed treatment regardless of anything else that was happening in this room.

“I’m going to work the posterior aspect,” I said. “Shift forward a little.”

He did. I moved to stand behind him and he adjusted again to give me access and now I was close enough I could feel the warmth coming off him and see the exact place where his hair was still just barely damp from his practice at the back of his neck. I set my thumbs into the muscle and pressed in and felt him exhale again, slower this time, and I focused on the tissue and the resistance and the way the muscle was starting to release under my hands and absolutely nothing else.

“You should have come in sooner,” I said. My voice came out steady. Thank God.

“I know.”