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“I want you to take an Epsom salt bath tonight, nice and hot, and stay in there for at least twenty minutes.”

“Maybe you could come over and join me.”

I hadn’t meant to say that, but the words just slipped out.

“Robbie!” she scolded, slamming her hands onto her hips. “If this is going to work, we need to keep things professional.”

“I don’t know how I can keep things professional when I’m trapped in a small room with the only woman I ever loved.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Yeah, but the thing is Violet,” I reached out and snagged her hand, wrapping my fingers around hers. “I never got over you.”

“Well get over me now,” she snapped, pulling her fingers away as if my hand was on fire. “The past is the past. Let’s just leave it alone.”

She grabbed my leg with more force than was probably necessary, pushing my knee towards my chest, then straightening it out and lifting it up towards the ceiling. I watched her as she focused on her task, rotating my leg in the hip joint to create more space in the capsule.

In the bright light I could see fine lines at the corners of her green eyes, and a tiny scar at the side of her chin that hadn’t been there before.

“What happened to your chin?” I asked.

“What?” she asked distractedly, rotating my leg out to the side.

“You have a scar on your chin now. It wasn’t there before.”

She paused so long I didn’t think she would answer. “I made the mistake of dating another football player a few years after we broke up.”

I popped up on the table, pulling my leg away so fast that I almost knocked Violet over.

“Did he hit you?” I could hear the cold violence in my voice, and it matched the fury in my veins.

“No, but he got mad at me about something and I told him to take me home, that I was done with him. It was stupid of me, I should have called for a taxi or something, but instead I let him drive me. He took a curve too tight while berating me, and we crashed into a tree.”

“You could have been killed!”

“He got the worst of it. I had cuts and bruises, but he broke his leg. It ended his career.”

“Wait, you dated Damian Johnson?”

He’d been in the draft two years behind me, but we’d never talked too much. He’d always been a cocky asshole, but we were all saddened when he had to step away.

“Yeah.”

“Too bad the crash didn’t kill him.”

Violet

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when I came out of work to find Robbie lounging against my car. The man had always been persistent – except when we broke up. That time he’d given up right away, which had just confirmed my suspicions that he’d cheated on me.

The problem was that I’d rehashed our conversation the other day about a million times, and I wasn’t as sure about that as I had been all those years ago.

“What are you doing here, Robbie?” I asked with a deep sigh. It had been a long day, partly because I’d been obsessed about seeing Robbie in the afternoon. It wasn’t like me to lose my focus, and I was annoyed with myself about it.

“I was hoping we could have dinner together,” he said, repeating the invitation he’d made a few hours ago.

I was shaking my head before he even finished.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”