Chapter 8 Elise
ELISE
Elise woke up thinking about Sienna's hands.
Not in any way she could defend to a reasonable person, but there it was.
The alarm had gone off at six-thirty, the grey light of early morning pressing through her curtains, and before she'd even rolled over or registered the ache in her shoulder or remembered what day it was, her brain had served up the image of Sienna's fingers on her scapula during yesterday's session, warm and certain, guiding her arm through its range of motion.
The memory lived in her muscles. The ghost of it lingered on her skin, the pressure of each fingertip, and it was doing things to her pulse rate that had nothing to do with the anti-inflammatories she'd forgotten to take.
She showered, dressed, ate a protein bar standing at the kitchen counter because she still hadn't managed to master the art of cooking one-handed, and drove to the stadium with the windows down and the radio playing a song she didn't hear.
The corridors were quiet at this hour. Training didn't start for another forty minutes and the facility had the empty, echoing quality of a building waiting to fill up.
Her trainers squeaked against the polished floor.
The gym was dark through the glass doors.
The team lounge was locked. Somewhere deep in the building, the ventilation system hummed, and the distant clang of someone stacking equipment in the storage room carried through the walls.
She was early. She knew she was early. Her session with Sienna wasn't until eight-thirty and it was barely eight, and there was no medical reason for her to be speed-walking down the corridor toward the medical suite with her gym bag bouncing against her good shoulder and her stomach flipping.
She wanted to see Sienna. That was the truth of it, stripped of every excuse she'd been constructing since yesterday.
Not because of the rehab or the shoulder or the professional obligation.
Because yesterday at Lavender's, Sienna had told her about the tennis career and the ankle and the dream that broke, and she'd looked at Elise across the café table and said "you were never a lost cause," and Elise had carried those words home like a talisman, turning them over in her mind before she fell asleep.
And then this morning, the hands.
She slowed as she reached Medical. The door was closed.
She knocked twice and heard Sienna's voice call "come in" from inside, and she pushed through the door with what she hoped was a casual expression that said "I'm here for my regularly scheduled appointment and definitely not twenty-five minutes early because I wanted to see you. "
Sienna was at her desk, typing notes on her laptop.
She turned when the door opened and her face went through a quick, complicated sequence that Elise was becoming an expert at reading: professional neutrality, then surprise, then pleasure, then the careful suppression of the pleasure back into neutrality.
All of it in about half a second. Sienna was wearing a dark green blouse today, silk, with the sleeves rolled to her elbows, and her glasses caught the overhead light when she tilted her head.
"You're early."
"I'm keen." She leaned against the doorframe with what she hoped was a casual shrug.
"You're very keen. You're twenty-five minutes keen."
Elise dropped her bag inside the door. "I'm a model patient. We established this."
The corner of Sienna's mouth curved upward. She closed her laptop and stood. "How's the shoulder this morning?"
"Stiff. But the pain's better. I'm down to a three most of the day."
Sienna crossed the room to the treatment bed and pulled the curtain back, a habit she maintained even when there was no one else in the suite. "Let's take a look. Top off, please."
Elise set her bag by the door and pulled her zip-up over her head.
The sling made undressing a production, a clumsy one-armed negotiation with fabric that used to take two seconds, and by the time she was down to her sports bra, she'd twisted the zip-up inside out and the sleeves were tangled around her sling straps.
She tossed it onto the chair with the grace of a cat falling off a shelf.
Sienna was watching. Not in the professional way, where her eyes tracked the injury site and assessed the range of motion and noted the clinical data.
In a different way. Her gaze moved across Elise's collarbone, down the line of her shoulders, across the exposed skin above her sports bra, and then caught itself.
Colour bloomed on her cheeks, quick and vivid, and she looked away, adjusting her glasses with a gesture Elise was starting to recognise as a tell.
Whenever Sienna was flustered, her hand went to her glasses.
Elise sat on the treatment bed and said nothing. She didn't need to. The blush on Sienna's cheeks was saying plenty, and the heat rising up Elise's own neck was saying the rest.
"Right." Sienna stepped closer, her expression resettled into professional calm.
"Let me check the joint." Her fingers found the shoulder, pressing along the anterior capsule, testing the swelling.
The bruise had faded further since last week, a pale yellow smudge across the deltoid that was barely visible now.
Every place Sienna touched, Elise's skin lit up.
It wasn't pain. It was the opposite of pain, a current that ran from the point of contact through her chest and down into her stomach, insistent.
Sienna's thumb pressed into the soft tissue above her clavicle and Elise's breath stuttered, just slightly, and she locked her jaw to keep from making a sound.
"External rotation." Sienna cradled Elise's elbow with one hand and placed the other flat against her scapula.
The palm was warm through the sports bra strap, each finger distinct.
She guided Elise's arm outward with slow, steady control, and Sienna's breath warmed her shoulder, close enough to stir the fine hairs on her skin.
"That's much better than last week," Sienna said. Her voice was steady but quieter than usual. "The laxity's decreasing. You're getting stronger."
"Must be the rehab gym work.”
Sienna's mouth twitched. She rotated Elise's arm into flexion, then abduction, her fingers adjusting with each position.
When she moved into the apprehension test, the position that had made Elise tense up last time, Elise braced for the flare of anxiety, but Sienna's grip was so secure and her hands were so warm that the fear didn't come.
Instead, she sat on the treatment bed in her sports bra with Sienna Park's hands on her body and let herself feel all of it.
The electricity. The want. The steady, deepening pull toward this woman who touched her with such care that it made her chest ache.
"How are you feeling?" Sienna asked, stepping back to make notes on her tablet. The question wasn't about the shoulder. Or maybe it was. With Sienna, the clinical and the personal bled together in ways that were getting harder to separate. "Generally, I mean. Beyond the rehab."
Elise pulled her knees up on the treatment bed and wrapped her good arm around them. The medical suite was quiet. The antiseptic smell of the room was undercut by Sienna's perfume, clean and subtle, the same scent she'd caught at Lavender's yesterday.
"Honestly?"
"Always."
"Low." The word came out flat. She hadn't meant to say it that plainly, but Sienna was looking at her with those dark, steady eyes and Elise didn't have the energy to perform fine.
"I'm really low, Sienna. The shoulder's getting better and I know the rehab is working and I should be grateful for that, but the rest of it.
.." She trailed off. Through the medical suite wall, the facility was waking up.
Footsteps in the corridor. The slam of a locker door.
Someone laughing. "The other players are great.
They text me, they check in, they tell me they miss me.
But they've got games and training and team dinners and all the things I used to be part of, and I'm standing on the outside watching it through a window. "
She hadn't said any of this to anyone. Not to Lou, who'd called her twice this week with practical, kind check-ins that somehow made her feel worse.
Not to Frankie, who'd stopped by her apartment with a six-pack and a card game and spent the evening carefully not talking about hockey.
Not to her mother, who'd called from California and asked if she was eating properly and told her to rest. They all cared.
She knew they cared. But none of them understood how fundamentally wrong it felt to be separated from the thing that defined her, as if someone had removed a load-bearing wall and expected the structure to hold.
Sienna set the tablet down. She pulled the stool from beneath the counter and sat on it, close to the treatment bed, her knees almost touching the edge where Elise sat.
"That isolation is normal," Sienna said. "It doesn't make it easier, but it's a recognised part of the injury process. Athletes tie their identity to their sport, and when the sport is taken away, the identity fractures. What you're describing isn't weakness. It's grief."
"Grief."
"For the version of yourself that's temporarily missing. The player, the teammate, the person who belongs in that locker room. She's coming back. But right now, she's gone, and that hurts."
Elise's throat closed. She pressed her lips together and looked at the ceiling, the acoustic tiles and the vent that needed cleaning, because if she kept looking at Sienna she was going to cry.