Chapter 3
Zoe
I get to the club facilities thirty minutes early because I’m so keyed up I can’t sit still at home.
Clearance letter from my OB-GYN, reports from private physical therapists, a detailed log of every exercise I’ve done for the past two months.
I prep for this evaluation like it’s a World Cup final.
Full dossier. Every number backed up. Every page labeled.
I need medical clearance to train with the team during preseason or I won’t be match-fit when the real games start.
I have to leave Wesley with my mom, and the separation hurts way more than I expect. His little face cracks me open. The poor kid doesn’t get why I’m going. He just knows I’m not picking him up. But I can’t bring him here. Not for the club medical evaluation.
When I walk in, the roar of the first strength session thumps through the main gym. Barbells clank. Music pounds. Someone shouts a count. The whole building feels alive, like it’s breathing.
I know the route to medical by heart. I’ve been in those offices dozens of times. Treatment for small injuries. Preseason physicals. The exam before contract renewals. But never for this. Never as someone who has to convince the medical team that her body can still do the job they pay her to do.
I wish Joe were still here. He knew my history. He knew what I could do. He trained with me after my ACL reconstruction and sent me back to the field in better shape than before the tear.
But Hades told me yesterday we have a new head of medical. One of the best in sports medicine, according to her. Came from Europe with a scary résumé.
Someone who doesn’t know me.
Someone who will look at the body I have right now and decide if it’s enough to make it through preseason.
“Come in,” a woman’s voice calls when I knock, and I swear I knock like I’m asking permission to breathe.
I push the door open.
“Fuck. Holy shit,” I rasp when I see her behind the desk.
Time doesn’t stop. That’s a dumb cliché.
But it does snap backward seven years, straight to the moment my life blew apart, and it’s because of the same person watching me now with calm eyes and a pen in her hand.
Seven years. Seven damn years without seeing her.
Without knowing where she is, what she’s doing, whether she ever thinks of me the way I think of her.
“Good morning, Zoe.”
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“I’m the new head of medical,” she says, like she’s telling me the weather.
“Yeah, I see that. I mean why here. There are thousands of soccer clubs on this planet. Why do you have to come to this one? Did you come back just to ruin my life? Wasn’t last time enough?”
My voice climbs higher than it should. I can tell by the way she goes pale and flicks her eyes to the door, still open. She doesn’t want a screaming match with a player in her first week. She’ll have to explain it to Hades.
Good. Let her.
“Can you calm down and close the door, please?” she asks, and her voice comes out thin.
“Calm down? Are you kidding me? How do you want me to calm down?” I don’t move from the doorway.
My hand grips the knob hard enough to hurt.
“This isn’t a game, Tessa. I’ve been off the field for a year.
I need the damn clearance to do preseason with the team or my chances at starting go to hell, and then my contract renewal goes with it.
Do you have any idea how stressed I am right now? The last thing I need is you.”
“This isn’t a game for me either, Zoe.” Her chin lifts. I remember that chin. I remember biting it once and making her laugh. “I’m a professional. One of the best in the world at what I do. Whatever happened between us seven years ago doesn’t—”
“Whatever happened between us?” The sound that comes out of me is ugly. Raw. “You wrecked my life, Tessa. You left half your stuff in the apartment we shared and you took off without telling me why.”
“I left you a letter.”
“A letter?” I bark out a laugh that tastes like blood. “So brave. You couldn’t say it to my face? Do you have any idea how many times I read that damn letter?” I slam my palm against the door. Hard. Pain blooms up my arm, sharp and hot, and I welcome it because it’s simple.
Silence.
Three seconds that feel like years.
I can hear my own heartbeat in my ears. Thick. Heavy. Like a drum.
“It wasn’t about you,” she says, and the words land like ice.
“Of course it wasn’t about me,” I shoot back, and I finally walk toward her desk, fast, like if I stop moving I’ll fall apart.
I plant both hands on the surface. The wood is cool under my palms. “It was about you being selfish and picking your career over us. It was about you deciding what we had wasn’t worth it. ”
Tessa barely flinches.
“You’re right,” she says. Just like that. “I chose my career. I chose to leave. I got scared. And you have every right to hate me for it.”
“Great.” I huff. “Because I hate you.”
It’s not fully true. I wish it were. It would be cleaner if hate were all I felt when I look at her.
But there’s more mixed in. Pain I think I buried.
Anger that never really leaves. And I refuse to think about her gray eyes.
Or her bare body. Or the way my name sounds when she says it like she means it.
“I get that this is… complicated,” she says, and she pauses like she’s picking her words off a shelf. “If you want someone else on the medical team to do your evaluation, I can ask Sara—”
“The Head Athletic Trainer?”
“Yes. She’s excellent, I’m told. She’s been with the club five years and she knows—”
“No.”
Tessa blinks. Her brows lift.
“No?”
“No.” I swallow, and my throat aches. “Hades told me you’re one of the best in sports medicine. That you worked with elite teams in Europe. Is that true?”
“Hades?”
“Diana. The coach. Long story. Is it true or not?”
“Yes,” she says. “It’s true.”
“Then I need you.” The words scrape out of me.
I hate that they’re honest. “I don’t want trouble with Hades, and you don’t either.
Believe me. I need you to get me back to my best shape as fast as possible because my career is on the line.
My contract ends this year. If I don’t prove I can get back to my level from before the pregnancy, they won’t renew me.
And if they don’t renew me…” I stop. I pull in a breath that shakes.
“I’m in a custody fight for my son, Wesley.
My ex-husband is saying a bunch of crap that makes me look like an unfit mother.
So I need to prove I can do both. I can be who I’ve always been on the field and still be the mother my kid needs. ”
“Ex-husband?” Her voice drops. “I didn’t… I didn’t know about the custody fight. I’m sorry. I mean, until yesterday, I thought you retired.”
“Why would you know?” I snap, because anger is easier than anything else. “You’ve been gone seven years. You don’t know anything about me. I’m guessing you haven’t been keeping up with my personal life or my career, right?”
“More than you think,” she says, and the confession steals my next line right out of my mouth.
I stare at her. My pulse spikes. My skin feels too tight.
“Look,” I say, because I have to keep moving. “We both know this is a mess. Working together is going to feel awful. But I also know you’re a professional. You always were. Even when you broke my heart, you did it with a neat little system and a plan.”
“Zoe…”
“Shut up and listen.” I cut her off before she can say something that makes this worse.
“You do your job. You evaluate me. You tell me what I have to do to get back on the field. And I’ll pretend that seeing you doesn’t drag me back to the worst year of my life.
I can even pretend I don’t know you at all, if you want. Can we do that?”
“We can,” she says at last. “But you need to understand something. If you’re not ready to play, I’m not making any exceptions for you.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“And I need you to be fully honest with me about any pain, any discomfort, anything you notice in your body. I can’t help you if you lie,” she says, crisp and clinical now.
“I don’t lie about injuries anymore,” I tell her. “I learned the hard way when I tore my ACL.”
“Good.” She points toward the exam table. “Let’s start. Take off your shoes and your shirt. I’m doing a full physical assessment.”
I freeze for a beat.
“My shirt?”
“I’ve seen you naked plenty of times,” she mutters, shrugging while she sets out supplies.
“That does not help.”
“You've had physicals done by a sixty-year-old man while wearing a sports bra and shorts.” She glances up, and for a second there’s a flicker of something that looks like amusement. “This should be much easier.”
I don’t argue. I don’t have a single good point. I don’t even know why I feel so nervous. I’m covered more than when I go to the beach in a bikini. But this is different.
It’s Tessa.
And for some reason I don’t understand, a strange little smile crosses her mouth and vanishes.
“Actually,” she says, like she’s thinking out loud, “since you just gave birth, I think the first thing I’ll do is check your pelvic floor.”
“What?”
Heat rushes up my neck so fast she probably thinks I’m about to have a heart attack. And I’m half-undressed. No shirt to hide it.
“Yeah, you know how it goes,” she continues, voice too calm. “Quick second. I put a little lubricant on the glove, I slide two fingers inside you—”
I stop breathing.
“I… I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I choke out.
She breaks.
She laughs, full and bright, like she can’t help it.
“I’m joking, idiot. You should see your face.”
“You’re such an asshole,” I growl.
For one second, I consider walking out. I’m so tight with tension I shake.
“I’m checking range of motion, then we evaluate your core,” she says, and she steps closer.
I only nod. I don’t trust my voice anymore.
Her fingertips slide along my ankle before she rotates the joint. Professional. Controlled. And my brain betrays me, stuffing itself with memories of those same fingers tracing lazy patterns down my bare back after we made love.
She moves to my knee. Each touch clean and clinical, and somehow that makes it worse, because I remember how it used to feel when it wasn’t.
And then I notice it.
Shit.
My nipples. Hard from the cold. Or from her hands on my skin. Or from her stupid comment. Or all of it at once. They show through my sports bra like a neon sign.
I cross my arms over my chest on instinct. Tessa rolls her eyes.
She still wears the same perfume. Citrus with a hint of wood. Nothing about it is soft. It’s sharp. It bites. It clings. I used to press my face into her neck just to breathe it in.
I shove the thought away while she keeps going. Under normal conditions I’d be asking questions. I’ve done this a hundred times. But I’m so wound up I just want it over. I want her to tell me I’m cleared to train with the team.
“Stand up,” she says, back to neutral. “Functional assessment. Plank. I want to see how long you hold.”
I get into a plank position on the mat. At least now my face points down.
Tessa kneels beside me, watching my form. Too close. I feel the heat of her body inches from mine, her gaze on the curve of my back.
“Your pelvis is dropping,” she says. “Tighten.”
I try. My arms start to shake at thirty seconds. By forty, I’m about to quit.
“Hold a little longer,” she whispers near my ear. “I know you can.”
My shoulders burn.
“Ten more seconds, Zoe.”
She puts her hand on my lower back, guiding me into position.
And fuck.
That touch shoots through me like a live wire.
I collapse onto the mat.
“Forty-seven seconds,” she announces, and she pulls her hand away too slow to feel casual. “You used to do three minutes like it was nothing.”
I don't answer. I stay facedown on the mat, grateful for a few seconds where she can't see my face, because I'm one breath away from crying.
Back then...
Back then, I didn't go a year without training.
Back then, I didn't have a baby.
And when our eyes meet, I know she sees it. Every mile of work still in front of me.