Chapter 11 Sienna
SIENNA
She shouldn't have come.
Mara had called twice and texted three times and finally sent a photo of herself holding a wine glass with the caption don't make me make Helen call you, and Sienna had gotten off the sofa in her pyjamas and changed and told herself it was for Mara.
It hadn't been for Mara. It had been because Elise would be here, and despite everything that had happened last night, the almost-kiss and her cowardly exit from the candlelit apartment, Sienna wanted to see her.
She'd wanted it with a clarity that had made her hands shake as she'd put on her wrap dress.
When she opened the door, the music hit her first, then the heat, then the noise of voices and laughter and the clink of glasses.
Lavender's café had been transformed. The lights were low and amber and the dance floor was occupied and the bar was three deep with women in their Saturday best. The Valkyries had taken over the back section, a sprawl of athletic women in casual clothes, their energy loud and victorious.
And then she saw Elise.
Elise was sitting on the edge of a sofa at the far end of the back section, slightly apart from the group.
She was in dark jeans and a black top that showed her collarbones, her dark hair down around her shoulders, and she was holding an empty glass and she looked like the loneliest person in the room.
Their eyes met. The room didn't disappear, that was a fiction, but it did narrow.
The noise and the heat and the music compressed until they were background, and the only thing in focus was Elise looking at her across a crowded bar with an expression that was surprise and hurt and hunger, raw and unresolved.
Sienna's chest compressed.
Then Mara was there, materialising from the crowd with a wine glass in one hand and the other hand reaching for Sienna's arm. "You came! I knew you'd come. Get a drink. What do you want? They have this thing with elderflower and it's actually not terrible."
Mara was delightful when tipsy. The controlled, authoritative coach was replaced by someone warmer, funnier, more physical.
She steered Sienna to the bar with a hand on her elbow and talked without pausing for breath about the game, about Lex's goals, about how Montreal's coach had looked physically ill during the third period.
Her sharp blue eyes were bright and her cheeks were flushed and she was gesturing with the wine glass as if she'd forgotten she was holding it.
"Elderflower soda," Sienna told the bartender. The woman behind the bar had short silver hair and a sleeve of botanical tattoos and she mixed the drink without comment. Mara looked at the elderflower soda with theatrical disappointment.
"Soda. You came to lesbian night at a bar on a Saturday and you ordered soda."
Sienna wrapped both hands around the cold glass. "I don't drink."
"I know you don't drink. I was hoping tonight might be the exception." Mara sipped her wine and gestured around the room, at the music and the dancing and the warm, easy atmosphere. "Live a little, Sienna."
"I'm living plenty."
"You're wearing lipstick for the first time since I've known you.
I'd say that's new." Mara's gaze sharpened, the coach's eye cutting through the wine fog, and for a moment Sienna saw the woman who ran a PWHL team and missed nothing.
Then the moment passed and Mara grinned and clinked her glass against Sienna's elderflower soda. "To Saturday nights."
The other players were warm and welcoming.
Frankie grabbed Sienna's arm and pulled her into a conversation about the game.
Camille complimented her jacket. Rowan waved shyly from across the table.
They treated her with the easy affection of people who considered her part of the team, not just the team's doctor, and the welcome was unfamiliar and good.
But Elise was still sitting on the edge of the sofa. Alone. While the team celebrated around her, she sat with an empty glass and red-rimmed eyes and a stillness that was not peace but its opposite, locked-down and held-together, the stillness of someone who was one wrong word from breaking.
Sienna had done this. Not the injury, not the isolation, not the fear of being replaced by Lex.
But the last piece, the final weight that had tipped the scale.
She'd taken the one connection Elise had, the one person who understood, and she'd pulled away on a sofa in a candlelit apartment and said I can't when what she'd meant was I'm terrified.
She'd left Elise alone in an apartment full of burned-down candles and half-drunk coffee and the wreckage of an evening that should have been beautiful.
The guilt was sharp and specific and it sat behind her ribs like a blade.
She extracted herself from Mara, who had moved on to telling Helen a story about a time she'd accidentally emailed a game strategy to the opposing coach ("I sent it to Marek, Helen.
He's the coach of the Calgary team. He sent it back with corrections.
"), and made her way through the back section to where Elise sat.
"Hi," she said. The word felt inadequate.
"Hi." Elise looked up at her. Her eyes were glassy. She'd been drinking. Not heavily, but enough that her edges were soft.
Sienna gripped her elderflower soda with both hands. "Can we talk? Outside?"
Elise studied her. Her eyes were guarded, wary, searching Sienna's face for the careful distance.
Sienna let her look. She didn't put the mask back on.
She didn't know if she could, not tonight, not standing this close to Elise in a bar full of music and candlelight and women who were free to want what they wanted.
Then Elise set her empty glass on the table and stood up. "Okay."
There were bistro tables out the front of Lavender's, small iron things with two chairs each, positioned along the pavement beneath a string of warm white lights that Lavender had strung from the building to the tree across the road.
The night was warm. The sound of the bar was muffled through the closed door, reduced to a low pulse of music and voices. The street smelled of the ocean.
They sat across from each other at one of the bistro tables.
The iron was cold through Sienna's dress and the table was small enough that their knees almost touched beneath it.
Elise's legs stretched out, her ankles near Sienna's, and the proximity was unavoidable.
A car passed slowly, its headlights sweeping the pavement.
The glow overhead made soft circles on the iron table between their hands.
Sienna could hear the muffled thump of the bass through the wall behind her, and further away, the ocean.
"I'm sorry," Sienna said. "About last night. About the way I left."
Elise looked at the table. Her finger traced a line in the condensation ring left by her glass. "You don't have to apologise. You were right. You're my doctor and I crossed a line."
Sienna shook her head. "You didn't cross a line."
"I tried to kiss you, Sienna. That's a line."
"You tried to kiss me and I wanted you to." The words were out, raw and honest, and they sat in the warm night air between them, undeniable. Elise's finger stopped tracing. She looked up.
"Then why did you pull away?"
"Because I was scared. Because you're my patient and I don't know how to be this person.
" Sienna's voice was steady but her hands, folded on the table, were not.
"I've spent my entire career keeping distance between myself and the people I treat.
It's a rule I've never broken. And then you got hurt and I started seeing you every day and you asked me questions nobody asks and you said my name at midnight and I.
.." She stopped. Swallowed. "I didn't pull away because I don't want you, Elise.
I pulled away because I want you so much it terrified me. "
The silence that followed was fragile and enormous. The string lights swayed in a breeze from the ocean. Somewhere inside Lavender's, Frankie's laughter rose above the music and fell away.
"I need to tell you this," Elise said. Her voice was quiet. Careful. "I've been walking around all day thinking you pulled away because you're not into women. Because you're straight and I misread everything and made it weird."
Sienna stared at her. "You thought I was straight?"
Elise's mouth twisted. "You never said otherwise."
"I..." Sienna opened her mouth. Closed it.
Of course Elise had thought that. Sienna had never told her.
She'd never told anyone on the team. She'd maintained her professional distance so thoroughly that her sexuality had been stored with everything else personal, locked in a drawer she didn't open at work.
"I'm gay, Elise. I've been gay since I was seventeen and kissed a girl behind the practice courts at a tennis tournament in San Diego.
I've never been with a man. I've just...
never been very good at telling people."
The words sat between them under the string lights.
Sienna's heart was hammering. She'd said it.
Out loud, to someone who mattered, in a way that wasn't clinical or detached or wrapped in professional context.
She'd said I'm gay and meant I'm gay and I want you and I've been wanting you for weeks and every moment I've spent pretending otherwise has been a lie.
Elise exhaled. The sound was shaky. "Okay."
Sienna's fingers tightened in her lap. "Okay?"
"That changes things." Elise's voice was unsteady. She pressed both palms flat against the iron table. "It changes a lot of things."
"I know."
Elise looked at her across the bistro table, and her expression was raw. The performance was gone, the dry humour, the controlled athlete's mask. She looked vulnerable and young and so beautiful in the warm glow that Sienna's chest hurt.