Chapter 10
LINE CHANGE (NATE)
The city hums outside my window while I’m sprawled on my couch with an ice pack wedged into my hip and ESPN on mute, replaying the same sixty minutes in my head. Not last night’s game, but an hour inside a room with a woman who used to be my entire summer.
Grown-up Eden is a menace.
Clinical voice. Cool hands. Eyes that say “I’ve got you” and “don’t try me” in the same breath.
If she were a bad PT, this would be easy.
I’d be annoyed, I’d ask Coach for someone else, and I’d go back to ignoring the ache in my groin and the bigger one in my chest. But she’s best-in-the-city, with a plan that promises to keep me on the ice through playoffs.
And worse—the part I can’t stop thinking about—is how she slipped in something different, not the usual PT routine.
Light pressure at my neck, barely-there touch that left me walking out clearer, lighter, like she’d flipped some hidden switch.
And the way she tried not to feel me while she did it. A flicker when I joked. The smallest pause when my breath hit her wrist. That quick swallow when she pressed me deeper into the stretch and realized where my head had gone.
The ice shifts against my skin as I reach for my phone. No texts from anyone I want to reply to. The guys sent a parade of memes after practice. The PR team sent a reminder about a charity skate with a hospital unit. I should answer them. Instead, I open a browser and type her name.
Eden Carver, DPT.
There she is on the clinic site—hair pulled back, smile polite but guarded, credentials stacked.
A list of specialties catches my eye—sports rehab, dance rehab, craniosacral therapy.
I don’t even know what the hell that last one means, only that whatever she did, it left me walking on air for a day.
An article about adductor strains with her name at the top.
I scan it. Clean, precise, no fluff. Exactly the way she touched me, no wasted movement, no lingering… unless she forgot.
Tenderness scrapes along my ribs. Ten years, and I still don’t know why she didn’t reply to my messages. Never picked up her phone. One day, she was sunburned nose and green grapes and braided bracelets, and the next she was a ghost. No explanation. Not even a lousy sorry, buddy, I’m busy.
I toss the phone down and stare at the ceiling.
What did I miss, Trouble? What part of the trick did I screw up?
I push off the couch and limp to the kitchen, more irritated at the limp than the pain. The freezer coughs up another ice pack, and I slap it on while the kettle hisses. Tea, because my body is a temple and all that crap.
Steam curls. I lean on the counter and try on a few lies. I’m not wound up. I’m not thinking about how she said she likes confidence. I’m not replaying the way her eyes slid to my mouth when I asked about her date.
Lies don’t fit.
Here’s the truth: I’ve spent most of my adult life asking without asking.
A lean-in, a look, a choice to stay. It’s easy when the answer is always yes.
It’s different when the only person I want to say yes is the one person I could never shake off—no matter how many miles, games, or other faces I tried to bury her under.
And here’s the next truth: she isn’t sixteen. I’m not eighteen. This isn’t a boardwalk and a wish on a fish anymore. She’s a woman. I want her eyes on me. Her mouth. Her hands.
I want her yes.
I carry the mug to the window and stand in the wash of the streetlights, hip throbbing, heart misfiring. A good goalie is patient. We live in the quiet between explosions. We wait, then we take the angle away. I can be patient.
Patient isn’t passive.
What opens her? Not force. Not noise. She told me the key: confidence, dominance done right. Not steamrolling. Not performing. Leading—steady, sure—so she can let go because she knows I’ve got her.
I exhale. The decision settles clean.
Start small, because small works. I’ll find her rhythm, then take the lead when the moment’s right. Nothing showy, nothing she can point to, but enough to signal the shift. If she pushes back, I ease off. If she leans in…we’re just getting started.
I sip the tea that tastes of grass and prudent decisions.
My hip spikes, a clean throb that says stop thinking and roll.
I grab my mat and drop to the floor. Adductor slides.
Groin flossing. Boring, brutal work. I breathe through the burn and picture her hands braced on my thigh, firm and unapologetic.
Heat pours through the ache. Great. Now I’m doing PT with a hard-on, acting like a teenage idiot all over again.
I flip over and go into a plank, hip steady, core tight, mind unhelpful.
I should be thinking about angles and rebounds.
Instead I’m cataloging all the tiny things I remember from every era of her—kid Eden with the shell bracelets and the way she avoided red grapes; teenager Eden learning to choke out boys twice her size; woman Eden keeping her distance, convinced I’m the last complication she needs.
I finish the set and roll onto my back, catching my breath in the quiet.
Any other woman and I’d line up the easy route: let her pick a loud bar where the lighting is kind and I don’t have to try too hard.
Then run the standard offense—hands, grin, one story, one joke.
Walk her home. End it tidy, wake up unfussed.
But I’m past easy. Easy is forgetting five minutes later. Easy is a name I don’t text.
I don’t want easy.
I want the moment she stops holding herself together and lets me take the lead. I want the exact second the air goes heavy and her hand stutters on my skin. I want to know why she disappeared and if there’s a way back to me.
The kettle clicks again, reminding me I’m standing still.
I text Coach I’ll be in the facility gym at seven for prehab before my treatment block.
If I’m first in, I set the tone. If I’m already warm and loose when she walks in, she doesn’t get the chance to throw me off; I’m the one setting the pace.
The phone buzzes with an instant thumbs-up. Coach thinks I’m dialed in. He’s not wrong. I am. Just…not to what he thinks.
I shower and crawl into bed, too awake for sleep, room dark except for the golden spill of the bedside lamp. My mind wanders back to Eden. I can hear her laugh under fireworks and the snap of the dock at sunset and the promise I made to myself at eighteen: don’t want what you can’t have.
Bad promise.
I want her anyway.
I drift somewhere between awake and out when the memory sneaks up—the ferry pulling away, her missing on the dock, the hollow ache in my chest I filled with hockey and miles and other women’s mouths. It still stings. Not in the way that makes you bitter. In the way that makes you stubborn.
Yeah, Trouble. I’m coming for the answer this time.
The facility is quiet in the morning—clean air, soft lights, the hum of treadmills, the low thud of a medicine ball against a wall.
I’m twenty minutes into a sweat when the trainers start rolling in, along with a couple of rookies.
I nod, finish a set of Copenhagen planks that torch my adductors, then wipe down and head for the PT wing.
I beat her there by five. Good. The room smells of antiseptic and eucalyptus. I drop my bag, then take the table with a lazy sprawl meant to signal I’m the one in control.
My pulse ticks higher. Not nerves. Anticipation. The blurriest memories are the loudest ones: her chin up when she’s scared, the way she tests a boundary before she crosses it, the tiny lines at the corners of her eyes when she’s trying not to smile. I want all of it. I want new tells.
Footsteps in the hall. Her voice, low and even, a quick hello to someone. A soft knock. The handle turns.
When she walks in, the energy in the room shifts an inch and everything slots into place. Her hair is in a ponytail today, and she’s wearing navy scrubs that should look plain but don’t. Her iPad is tucked to her chest like a shield.
Her gaze hits my face, skates away, then drags back. The barest flush rises in her throat. There it is. Tell one.
She sets the iPad down. “You’re early.”
“So are you,” I say, glancing at the clock. “Must’ve caught the first train in.”
A quick, almost imperceptible lift of her shoulder—she doesn’t want to make a thing of it. “Didn’t want to risk being late.”
I file it away. Tarrytown’s a haul from the city. Means she was up before dawn.
“Morning,” I add, voice easy as a Sunday. “Figured I’d warm up for you.”
“For…me,” she repeats, and I swear I hear her swallow before the professional mask slips back over her face. “Let’s start with range. How did it feel overnight?”
“Better,” I say, because it did. “Worse when I think about you.”
Her eyes flick up. We both heard what I didn’t say. We both decide to pretend it meant something else.
She moves into my space without hesitation.
The scent of her hits me—clean skin, faint shampoo, that hint of eucalyptus from the room—and for a second my body forgets it’s supposed to behave.
She brackets my knee, slides my leg where she needs it, and the contact is pure electricity through muscle and memory. I keep still. I let her work.
“Breathe,” she says.
“Yes, ma’am.” I say it on purpose. Her jaw ticks. Tell two.
She tests rotation, flexion, the sticky spot where I guard.
I grit my teeth, waiting for pain. Instead, she wheels a small stool to the head of the table, sits, and her hands shift—light, barely there—settling at the base of my skull.
Fingers cradle me, steady and warm. Unexpected. Intimate, if I didn’t know better.
Her face is so close, all it would take is one lift of my hand to pull her mouth to mine. Instead, my eyes snap to hers. “Thought this was about my hip.”
Her mouth curves, faintly. “Just…breathe.”
I close my eyes, her scent brushing against my skin, and try. In. Out. The minutes stretch, and little by little, the tension I’ve been carrying bleeds away. My hip still throbs, but the rest of me feels loose. Lighter.
And when she’s fully in the driver’s seat, I tap the brake—not more than a shift of my palm on the table, my head turning to find her again.
“You ever think we stopped talking because we were both cowards?”
Her hands tense. It’s half a second, maybe less, but it’s a lifetime if you know her. She doesn’t look at me when she answers. “We stopped talking because life happened.”
“Life happens to everybody,” I say. “You disappeared on me.”
“You left for training. I went to school. Graduated. Worked. Lived.” She takes her palms from underneath my head and finally meets my gaze. “And today, I treat your hip.”
I let a slow smile touch my mouth. “Ok. Treat me.”
The air tightens by a degree. She rounds the table and reaches for lotion. Her hands find my adductor, firm pressure, precise intent. My vision blurs at the edges in a way that has nothing to do with pain. A quiet sound slips out of me.
Her lashes flicker. Tell three. Proof I’m not a ghost to her, no matter how much she pretends otherwise.
That’s all I need right now. Not a confession. Not a crack in her armor. Just those little betrayals her body can’t hide. Because if she still feels me, I can lean until the door opens.