CHAPTER 10 — JUST PHYSICAL
POV: Noah Bennett
Riding back to Northaven on the same bus as Damon Blackwood after spending the early morning hours in his bed felt like a punishment designed by someone with a gift for quiet humiliation.
The team slept, laughed quietly, or reviewed plays on their phones.
Mason played cards in the back with two defenders, and my father read reports in the front seat—but every mile felt dominated by Damon’s deliberate absence.
He sat three rows ahead, by the window, shoulder bandaged under his jacket, earbuds in, face turned toward the glass as if the rain-soaked world outside were more interesting than anything on the bus.
I should have been grateful for the distance.
Should have used his silence as proof that some boundary still existed between us, some margin of control after a night when control had become nothing more than a pretty, useless word.
Instead, I felt the distance like an ill-fitting second skin, chafing in places I didn’t want to name.
My mouth still remembered his, my body still carried invisible marks from hands that had been careful and hungry at once, and my traitorous mind kept replaying what Damon had said in the dark: if he crossed that line again, it would be because we both asked.
The problem wasn’t that Damon had touched me.
The problem was that he’d asked, waited, listened, stopped when I told him to—and then looked at me as if the night had torn something out of him too.
If it had been just anger, I’d know what to do with it.
If it had been just desire, maybe I could file it away in some adult compartment, slam it shut, and keep working.
But Damon had pressed his forehead to mine afterward, had admitted pain without turning everything into a fight, and almost—almost—asked me to stay when I got up before dawn.
That almost-word was the part that kept cutting me.
When we pulled up to the university, the sky hung low and heavy, a fine rain leaving the entire campus gray and slick.
Northaven seemed too quiet for a place capable of chewing up stories and spitting out convenient versions.
The players filed off the bus complaining about sleep and hunger while the staff hauled bags, sticks, and equipment boxes.
I kept my attention on the evaluation list, checking names and schedules, but I felt Damon before I saw him stop beside me.
He wasn’t standing too close. He didn’t need to.
His presence always found a way to close the distance.
“Evaluation at two,” I said without looking up from the tablet, because if I looked at him in that rain-soaked parking lot, I might remember his warm skin under the hotel’s yellow light.
“Physical therapy room. No training beforehand. No heroic stretching in the shower. No trying to convince Mason to pretend you’re fine. ”
“Good morning to you too, Bennett,” Damon replied, his voice low and controlled—too composed for someone who’d bitten my neck a few hours ago. “Sleep well?”
My finger froze on the screen. The question could have been innocent from anyone else.
From him, it carried rumpled sheets, breathing in the dark, and the way his hand had lingered on my waist after his body finally relaxed.
I raised my face slowly, braced for provocation.
I found something worse: Damon with a neutral expression, cold eyes, as if testing whether I’d be the first to acknowledge that the night had happened.
“Enough to remember you’re on contact restrictions and need ice if the pain goes above a five,” I said, choosing safer ground because anything else would make me bleed in public.
“Always professional.”
The words landed without any clear insult, but they hit anyway.
Damon gripped his backpack strap with his right hand, left shoulder protected under his jacket, his face a mask of post-game coldness.
There was no trace of the vulnerability from those early morning hours, no sign of the man who’d asked if he could take off my shirt and waited for me to say yes.
There was only Northaven’s captain—perfect, untouchable, and cruel enough to make me feel stupid for remembering he’d been something else in the dark.
“Someone has to be,” I said, and regretted it instantly—the words came out more wounded than professional.
His eyes shifted for a fraction of a second.
Not enough for anyone else to notice, but I did.
Damon opened his mouth—maybe to respond, maybe to do something less cruel—but my father called the team over near the arena entrance, and the moment dissolved before it could become a choice.
Damon looked away first. I should have felt relieved.
Instead, I watched his back disappear through the drizzle, carrying a silent anger that was half his and half mine.
Northaven’s physical therapy room felt different after the trip.
Maybe because now I knew the taste of the man who’d be sitting on that table in a few hours.
Maybe because the clinical environment—white lights, labeled cabinets, the smell of rubbing alcohol—felt like a ridiculous attempt to convince my body that everything between Damon and me could fit neatly on an evaluation form.
I spent the morning organizing reports, treating players with minor aches, video chatting with Marjorie, and pretending I wasn’t glancing at the door every time heavy footsteps passed in the hallway.
Damon showed up at seven past two—late enough to provoke, not late enough to justify a formal reprimand.
He walked in without knocking, wearing black training pants, a Northaven shirt, and a carefully blank expression.
The shirt clung to his torso in a way my memory didn’t need any help completing.
I felt heat crawl up my neck and dropped my eyes to the chart before he could see too much—though with Damon, hoping to hide anything was always a form of stupid optimism.
“Seven minutes late,” I said, picking up a pen and gesturing toward the table without quite meeting his eyes. “Are you trying to test my patience or just your recovery?”
“Your limits seemed pretty flexible last night,” he said, settling onto the table with the calm of someone throwing a knife and waiting to see where it landed.
The pen almost slipped from my fingers. It didn’t fall.
Small victories still counted. I looked at him then, and Damon held my gaze with a coldness I couldn’t quite read.
There was provocation there, yes, but also defense.
I watched the wall rebuilding itself brick by brick, higher now precisely because the night had knocked it down in so many places.
The rational part of me understood that.
The tired, wanting, wounded part of me wanted to snap the pen in half.
“If you want to turn what happened into ammunition, at least wait until I’m done evaluating your shoulder,” I said, setting the chart on the counter. “It’ll be easier to document your emotional regression alongside the physical.”
“Regression?” His mouth curved, humorless. “Interesting. I would have called it a relapse.”
The word landed flat. Relapse was an elegant way to minimize things.
It turned the night into a failure of self-control, a chemical slip, an isolated episode that could be put in quotes and left behind.
I approached the exam table with the measuring tape and goniometer, keeping my face neutral because I’d already learned, the hard way, that Damon could smell emotional pain like a shark scenting blood.
“Raise your arm as far as you can,” I said.
He obeyed. The movement was better than the day before, despite the post-game stiffness, but he was still compensating with his torso.
I placed my hand on the side of his chest to block the faulty rotation and felt, with an almost desperate irritation, his body react under my palm.
It wasn’t my imagination. His breathing changed.
The muscle under my hand tensed. His gaze dropped to my fingers, then returned to my face with an intensity that made the room feel too small for anyone else to be in it.
“Like this?” Damon asked, voice low.
“Don’t force it,” I replied, pulling my hand back before the memory of last night could settle permanently into the touch. “You’re compensating to look better than you are.”
“Maybe I like looking better than I am.”
“I noticed. Must be exhausting.”
The line almost pulled a smile from him, but it didn’t stick.
Damon lowered his arm slowly, and I focused on the chart, on the pain scale, on the angle of movement.
The more professional I got, the more he seemed determined to pull me out of that mode.
It was a dangerous game because I wanted out.
I wanted to ask why he was doing this, why the morning had turned tenderness into ice, why the man who’d held my face in the dark now looked at me like I was just another weakness to be corrected.
“Pain level, one to ten?” I asked, touching the area near his collarbone with light fingers, checking for inflammation.
“Four.”
“Try again.”
“Five.”
“Damon.”
“Six when you touch like that.”
My hand stopped. He didn’t smile. The comment could have been easy sexual provocation, but his eyes were too serious, locked on mine, and for a few seconds the medical room became the hotel room again.
His thumb traced the edge of the table, like he was holding onto something invisible.
My chest tightened at the memory of the promise he’d made—not to use that night as a weapon.
Maybe Damon didn’t know the difference between a weapon and a plea when he was scared.
Maybe he knew and was choosing wrong anyway.
“Don’t do this,” I said quietly, low enough that no one passing in the hallway would hear. “Don’t bring up the subject just enough to throw me off balance and then pretend it was a joke.”
“I’m not joking.”
“Then what are you doing?”