Chapter 7
seven
. . .
WHITNEY
The next morning comes too fast for someone who spent last night replaying a humiliating amount of frosting-related eye contact.
Coach Owens gives announcements, Ren and Dani gossip about someone’s sponsor shoot, and the rest of the Current women divide themselves amongst the dryland stations.
After Winnie graciously gave me a fork to eat my cake, I fielded her questions about my run-in with Connor.
Between sets, I spot Connor on the other side of the deck doing scap stability with a theraband like it’s foreplay for his rotator cuff. No banter, no swagger, just quiet focus and biceps that have absolutely never known humility.
And yeah, okay, I watch longer than is strictly necessary for a peer-to-peer athletic assessment. Sue me.
The guys finish their block work and migrate toward the locker room, joking and snapping towels and generally existing as a single organism with seven heads and one shared brain cell.
Connor doesn’t join them.
He finishes his band set, picks up his water bottle, and stands there like he’s waiting for a spot that never opens. He doesn’t look pitiful, just peripheral. Like a puzzle piece nobody’s sure which box it came from.
It hits me in the sternum harder than expected.
Swimming is already lonely. Doing it without a team? That’s fuel for nightmares.
I push up to change stations when it happens—hip flexor rebellion.
The pain zings through my hip and down my IT band like a bolt of bodily betrayal. I hiss through my teeth and try to stretch it out discreetly.
Ren glances over. “You good or do we need to amputate?”
I lower down to the mat and attempt to make muscle cramping look like part of my warm-up.
“I’m fine. Just a hip cramp. Totally normal. Totally fine.”
A shadow falls across my mat.
“Your face says otherwise,” Connor says, crouching. “Where’s the pain?”
“My hip.” I gesture with the vague panic of someone trying not to make eye contact with the hot guy who has just witnessed me flailing around the mat like a dying fish. Then, I realize after yesterday, he’s probably already used to my brand of awkward.
His gaze drops once—quick, clinical—then flicks back to my face. And for half a second, I swear his eyes catch on my mouth like he’s remembering frosting and my complete lack of shame yesterday.
I clear my throat. “No cake today,” I blurt, because my brain is a traitor.
Connor blinks like he’s resetting. “Can I?” he asks, motioning to my hips.
Okay, so here’s the part where I could pretend to hesitate and maintain dignity, or I could let the hot tattooed man adjust my pelvis.
“Yeah,” I hear myself say. “Sure.”
He brackets my hips with both hands—warm, strong, ridiculously confident—and rotates my leg open like he’s fine-tuning an engine instead of touching a woman who is fighting for her last coherent brain cell.
My entire nervous system lights up like someone flipped a breaker.
Jesus. He’s strong. Not just swimmer strong—functional strong. The kind of strength that makes you imagine what his hands would feel like on your thighs for reasons that are not medical.
“Let your knee fall,” he murmurs, voice low and intoxicating. “Don’t fight it.”
Right. Don’t fight it.
I imagine pulling him down on top of me and feeling the weight of him between my legs, but that’s not what he’s talking about.
But I’m discovering that not fighting is much harder when an offensively attractive man is holding your hips in place and looking at you like you’re a puzzle he’d enjoy solving.
The stretch hits, sharp for a second, then releases with a rush that steals my breath right out of my lungs.
He leans over me to monitor the angle, forearms bracketing my torso, and for a half-second all I can think about is how close his mouth is to mine and how easy it would be for gravity and bad decisions to take the wheel.
My thighs tense involuntarily.
My brain chimes in. We could ride this man like a jet ski.
“Oh. Wow,” is what comes out of my mouth.
“Breathe,” he says.
If I breathe any harder, I’m going to start panting like it’s foreplay.
His thumbs press into the inside of my hip bones, grounding and precise, and heat rockets straight between my legs in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with recovery protocols and everything to do with the fact he is built like the best mistake waiting to happen.
“That’s your TFL firing,” he says.
My pupils dilate like I’m being medically examined by a sex demon.
“TFL? That sounds like a Starbucks drink.”
One corner of his mouth curves. “Tensor fasciae latae.”
“Oh yeah, super sexy. Say it again but slower.”
He huffs out something that might be a laugh and gives a barely noticeable extra push on the stretch—nothing vulgar or inappropriate—but my body reacts like he just whispered something filthy in my ear.
If a teammate tried to talk to me right now I would simply die.
“Straighten slowly,” he instructs.
I extend my leg, and the relief is instant—so is the disappointment that his hands have to leave my hips eventually.
“Better?” he asks.
“Umm-hmm.” That’s all I manage.
“Good,” he says quietly, fingertips dragging off my hip in a way my body will absolutely be replaying later in high definition.
He stands and heads toward the blocks like he didn’t just stimulate half my major muscle groups and several minor fantasies in front of witnesses.
Ren drops onto the mat like she’s been waiting for the debrief. “Ma’am. Be serious. How are you still breathing after that?”
“I’m not,” I whisper.
Dani rolls over on her foam roller. “That man could correct my biomechanics anytime.”
I bury my face in my towel. “Please let me perish in peace.”
That’s exactly when Winnie appears, tablet tucked under her arm, looking between the three of us like she just walked into the aftermath of a small but notable scandal.
“What happened?”
“Whitney got a cramp,” Ren says. “But Connor fixed it. Spiritually.”
Dani nods gravely. “There were hands. And hips. And science.”
Winnie squints at me. “Any pain?”
“Yes,” I say, muffled by the towel. “But not your department.”
She snorts—an actual laugh, which means she’s either in a good mood or resigned to dealing with my antics.
“Come on,” Winnie says, helping me up. “Let’s get you checked out.”
When I look back toward the pool, I catch Connor on the block, rolling his shoulders, back muscles flexing under tattooed skin. He glances over—just once—and something hot and dangerous flickers in his eyes before he dives.
Yeah. No amount of stretching is going to fix that problem.
In the training room, Winnie wraps the ice pack around my hip and secures it with the same precision she uses to tape ankles before meets. No fuss, no pep talks, just efficient competence.
“You’ll be sore tonight,” she says. “Mobility in the morning. Pool Tuesday if it behaves.”
“Love that for me,” I deadpan, because if I don’t make jokes I will simply evaporate from shame.
She pulls up the rolling stool and sits, giving me the assessment look. The one that sees through both muscle tissue and emotional nonsense.
“So. You and Connor,” she says casually, like she’s asking about my macros.
“There is no ‘me and Connor.’ There’s a hip cramp and a plethora of inappropriate thoughts.”
Winnie’s mouth doesn’t smile, but her eyes absolutely do. “Mm-hm.”
I point at her. “Don’t ‘mm-hm’ me.”
“I have to. It’s in my job description,” she says. “Evaluate injuries, monitor recovery, identify catastrophic crushes—”
“It’s not a crush.”
“It is totally a crush.”
I groan and cover my face. “This is harassment.”
Winnie raises an eyebrow. “Trust me, if it were harassment, I’d ask how long you’ve been picturing him naked. I’m being restrained.”
I drop my hands. “Zero minutes. Zero seconds. I’m a professional.”
Winnie stares at me in disbelief.
“Fine,” I hiss. “Fifteen seconds. Maybe thirty. I wasn’t timing it.” And I’m definitely not counting every mental image I’ve conjured since the cake disaster yesterday.
“Just facts for my chart,” she says, tapping her tablet even though I know she’s not writing a damn thing.
“I heard the moan you made from across the deck.”
I make a strangled noise. “I was in pain.”
“You were in something.”
I fall back on the table and cover my eyes again. “I hate you so much right now.”
“No, you don’t,” she says, patting my shin. “I’m the only person in this training center legally required to ice your pelvis.”
I peek at her through my fingers. “You can’t say ‘ice your pelvis’ like it’s normal.”
“It is normal. You’re the one sexualizing therapy.”
“That was Connor’s fault.”
“Of course it was.”
She stands to toss the ice wrapper. “Also, for what it’s worth? The man was staring at you like you personally invented hip stabilizers.”
I bolt upright. “He was not.”
“He was,” she says. “I have functional eyeballs.”
Heat crawls up my chest. “Okay, well, it doesn’t matter. Rory hates him.”
Winnie pauses, leans a shoulder against the doorframe, and asks innocently, “Does Rory also get dibs on who you’re allowed to thirst over?”
I sputter. “It’s not thirst—”
“It’s Olympic-level thirst,” she corrects. “You could hydrate the whole team with it.”
My jaw drops. “You’re fired. You’re dead to me.”
Winnie nods once, satisfied. “Good. That means we’re done with denial and moving into acceptance.”
Then she leaves me alone with my ice pack, my unruly hormones, and the increasingly unhelpful realization that my brother’s rival may also be my type.