Chapter 7 Sienna #2
"You're going to make a full recovery," she said instead.
Her voice was steady even though her pulse wasn't. "Your tissue is healing well.
Your strength is coming back. And when you return, you'll be the same player you were before the injury, because the things that make you valuable to this team aren't things that a labral tear can take away. "
Elise looked at her. The green of her eyes was vivid in the morning light, bright against the dark circles beneath them. "What things?"
"Your game intelligence. Your discipline in the faceoff circle.
Your ability to read the play three passes ahead.
Your work rate. The way the team trusts you to be in the right place at the right time.
" Sienna paused. She was crossing a line, moving from medical assessment into personal territory, but Elise was looking at her with such open, unguarded hope that she couldn't stop.
"Lex is a brilliant player. But she plays a different game than you do.
She's explosive. You're structural. The team needs both. "
Elise was quiet. They passed a bench overlooking the water, where an older couple sat with a small dog between them, and the dog watched them go with its head tilted.
"Nobody's said that to me before," Elise said. "That the team needs both."
"Then nobody's been paying attention."
The corner of Elise's mouth lifted. Not a full smile, but the ghost of one, and Sienna's chest expanded with a feeling that had no business being there.
Lavender's was a small café with pale purple walls, whitewashed furniture, and a counter display of pastries that changed daily.
It was certainly the local lesbian hangout although Sienna never quite felt like she fit, she always felt welcomed.
The owner, a woman named Lavender with silver hair, greeted them.
Sienna had been coming here since her first week in Phoenix Ridge, drawn by the good coffee and the window table that overlooked the street.
They ordered at the counter. Sienna got a flat white and a slice of lemon and poppyseed cake that looked too beautiful to eat, golden crumb and a thin drizzle of icing.
Elise ordered a long black and a toasted sandwich, one-handed, struggling slightly with her wallet until Sienna reached over and held the card reader steady for her.
Their fingers brushed, Sienna's knuckles against the backs of Elise's fingers, and the contact was brief and accidental and Sienna's skin remembered it for minutes afterward. She pretended not to notice.
They settled into the window table. The sun came through the glass in a warm rectangle that fell across their hands and the wooden surface between them.
Elise sat with her sling resting on the table edge and her long legs stretched under the chair, and Sienna sat opposite with her cake and her coffee and the increasingly persistent awareness that she was having a meal with a woman she was attracted to and calling it professional support.
"How long have you been playing?" Sienna asked.
Elise turned her coffee cup in a slow circle on the saucer.
"Since I was eight. My mom couldn't afford the equipment, so she worked extra shifts to pay for it.
Twelve-hour days, then she'd drive me to practice at six in the morning.
" She paused, the cup going still. "She never complained.
Not once. Even when the car broke down and she couldn't afford to fix it and she drove me to practice with the check engine light on for three months. "
"She sounds incredible."
"She is. She's the reason I play." Elise looked out the window.
A woman walked past with a pram, and a cyclist wove between parked cars.
"I got a scholarship to college. First person in my family.
My dad cried, which he never does, and my sister Sophie was furious because she's two years older and she'd applied for the same scholarship the year before and didn't get it.
" A brief smile, warm with memory. "She's over it now. Mostly."
"And after college?"
"Minor leagues for years. Grinding it out, playing in front of two hundred people in arenas that smelled of hot dogs and bleach and stale beer.
Sharing hotel rooms with teammates and eating gas station sandwiches on the bus between games.
Then the PWHL happened and suddenly there was a path.
A real one. A league with contracts and salaries and crowds that actually cared.
" Her voice had shifted, the quiet stripped out of it, pride in its place.
"I was one of the first players signed to the Valkyries.
Before Lex, before the big crowds, before the TV deals.
I was here when this team was nothing, and I helped build it into what it is. "
The pride in her voice, quiet and hard-won, made Sienna's throat tight.
"That's what scares me," Elise said, quieter now. "Not that Lex is good. She's great. But I gave five years to this team. I moved across the country for it. I don't have a plan B. Hockey is all I know."
Sienna sipped her coffee and ate a forkful of cake, tart lemon cutting through the sweet icing, the crunch of poppy seeds on her tongue. The café was filling up around them, the gentle clatter of cups and murmur of conversation creating a privacy that felt more intimate than a quiet room.
"I used to be a tennis player," she said.
Elise set her coffee cup down on the saucer. "You mentioned that. Where?"
"San Diego. I was ranked in the junior circuit by the time I was sixteen.
My parents were convinced I was going to be the next Michael Chang.
" She smiled at the memory, which was both fond and painful.
"I wasn't. I was good, but I wasn't transcendent.
I made it to the professional tour, played a few qualifying rounds at the US Open, and then I destroyed my ankle at nineteen. "
Elise set her coffee cup down. "What happened?"
"Stress fracture that I'd been ignoring for months because my parents had sacrificed everything for my career and I couldn't face telling them my body was failing.
It collapsed during a match in Brisbane.
A second-round qualifier against a player ranked below me.
I heard the bone go." She traced the rim of her coffee cup.
The memory was old but still had edges, still caught her in the ribs when she turned toward it too quickly.
"I spent six months in a boot and another year in rehab, and by the time I could play again, I'd lost my ranking and my sponsors and most of my confidence.
That's when I decided to study medicine. "
"So your injury led you here."
"In a roundabout way, yes." Sienna met Elise's eyes across the table.
"The worst thing that happened to me became the best thing.
I don't say that to minimise what you're going through.
I know how it feels to sit on the outside and watch other people live the life you wanted.
But sometimes the path changes and you end up somewhere better. "
Elise studied her. The café sounds faded. The sun had moved across the table and was touching the edge of Sienna's hand, warm on her knuckles.
"Tell me more," Elise said. "About you. Not the doctor. You."
The question caught Sienna off guard. People didn't ask her about herself.
They asked about their injuries, their rehab timelines, their pain levels.
They asked her for professional opinions and medical clearances.
They didn't lean across café tables with genuine curiosity and ask her to talk about herself as if she were someone worth knowing.
"What do you want to know?"
"Anything. Everything. Where did you grow up? Do you have siblings? What do you do when you're not fixing athletes?"
Sienna laughed. The sound surprised her, light and unguarded in a way she rarely was.
"I grew up in San Diego. My father is a cardiologist and my mother was also a doctor and a part time concert pianist. No siblings.
I read medical journals for fun, which I know is pathetic.
I swim in the ocean three mornings a week because it's the only thing that makes my brain quiet.
And I make very good scrambled eggs, as you know. "
Elise grinned. A real grin, wide and open, and the heat in Sienna's chest spiked.
"Concert pianist," Elise said. "That explains a lot."
"What does it explain?"
"The attention to detail. The focus. You fold your napkin into perfect squares." Elise nodded at Sienna's hands, where she had, in fact, been folding her napkin into neat quarters without realising it.
Sienna looked down at her hands. The napkin was perfectly squared. She unfolded it with what she hoped was casual grace and set it on the table.
"My mother would be thrilled to know her legacy is napkin folding."
“And you have nice hands and long fingers.”
There was a pause and their eyes met and Sienna felt herself blushing.
"Wait. When you were sixteen on the junior tennis circuit, I was five." Elise's eyebrows rose. "You were competing at the US Open while I was learning to tie my shoes."
"Thank you for that maths. I feel ancient now."
"Not ancient. Seasoned." Elise's mouth twitched. "Distinguished."
"You're making it worse."
"Experienced. Mature. Chronologically blessed."
"I will pour this coffee on your sling."
Elise laughed, and the sound went through Sienna like sunlight through glass, warm and direct and illuminating everything it touched.
She was so beautiful when she laughed. Her whole face changed, the worry lines smoothing out, her eyes crinkling, her mouth wide and generous.
Her dark hair was drying in loose waves around her face and the sling made her look younger somehow, less armoured, as if the injury had stripped away the composed exterior she usually wore on the ice.
Sienna reached for her coffee and realised her hand was trembling. Barely perceptible, the slightest vibration in her fingertips, but she felt it. She wrapped both hands around the cup and held on.
"Thank you for this," Elise said. Her voice had gone quiet again, but it was a different kind of quiet now. Warm. "For bringing me here. For telling me about the tennis. For just... talking to me like a person instead of a patient."
"You are a person."
"I know. But sometimes I forget." Elise held her gaze, direct and searching, and Sienna let herself be seen.
It was terrifying. Being seen by Elise Moreno, without the shield of a medical chart or a professional title or the safe distance she'd maintained for twenty years with every woman who'd ever made her pulse quicken.
Elise was looking at her across a café table in the late morning sun and seeing her, not Dr. Park, not the Valkyries' physician, but Sienna.
The woman who swam in the ocean and folded napkins and had once been a tennis player with a dream that broke.
"We should head back," Sienna said, because if she sat here any longer she was going to say words she couldn't take back. "I have an appointment at one."
"Right." Elise straightened, and her face fell for half a second before she caught it. "Thanks, Doc."
"Sienna."
The word was out of her mouth before she'd decided to say it. Elise's eyes widened, just slightly, and the corner of her mouth curved upward.
"Thanks, Sienna."
Her name in Elise's mouth was everything it had been in the text at midnight, warm and intimate and too close to what she wanted, and Sienna stood up and gathered her things and walked out of Lavender's into the sunshine with Elise beside her and her pulse pounding against her ribs.
They walked back to the stadium in silence that was full of things neither of them said. Their arms brushed once, at the corner where the waterfront path turned back toward the stadium, and neither of them moved away. A seagull cried overhead.
And Sienna looked at Elise's profile, the sun full on her face now, the strong jaw and the dark lashes and the mouth that was trying not to smile, and she thought: I am not going to survive this.