Chapter 17 Sienna #2
She came down the bench and the grin on her face was wide and uninhibited and the most beautiful thing Sienna had ever seen in this arena or anywhere else.
Sweat darkened the hair at her temples. Her chest was heaving from the exertion.
She looked alive. Completely, radiantly alive, as she'd looked in the cove at sunrise but multiplied, amplified, because this was Elise in her element, Elise doing the thing she was born to do, and the eight weeks of fear and isolation had burned away in ten minutes of ice time.
Sienna stood. She didn't think about it.
She didn't weigh the professional implications or consider who was watching or calculate the risk.
She opened her arms and Elise walked into them and Sienna held her, right there on the bench, in front of the team and the cameras and the arena, and Elise's sweaty jersey pressed against Sienna's polo and Elise's arms wrapped around her waist and they held each other.
"You were incredible," Sienna whispered against her hair.
"I'm back," Elise said. Her voice broke on the word.
Lavender's was quiet on a Thursday evening.
The pale purple walls and whitewashed furniture looked different in the evening light, softer, more intimate.
Lavender was behind the bar, her silver-streaked dark hair loose, and she'd waved them in with a knowing smile and put them at the window table, the one they'd sat at the first time they came here together, back when they were still pretending it was just coffee between a doctor and her patient.
They weren't pretending anymore.
Sienna had ordered sparkling water with lime.
The bubbles rose in a steady column and the lime wedge bobbed against the ice.
Elise had a glass of red wine that she was nursing slowly, her cheeks still flushed from the game, her hair down around her shoulders.
She'd changed out of her game clothes into jeans and a dark top and the gold chain she wore outside of uniform, and she looked relaxed and so present that the restaurant might as well have been empty.
Lavender had brought them the bruschetta without asking and a lemon poppyseed cake for later, the same order they'd had on that first visit, and the familiarity of it filled Sienna with a tenderness she was learning not to fight.
Sienna took a sip of her sparkling water, the lime tart and sharp against the fizz, and Elise was so beautiful across the table that she kept losing track of the conversation.
"Mara said she's going to rotate me and Lex," Elise said, twirling the wine glass between her fingers. "Different roles. Lex takes the power minutes, I take the tactical shifts. She said the team is better with both of us."
"She's right." Sienna turned the sparkling water glass between her fingers, the lime wedge bobbing against the ice.
"I know. I think I've always known. I just needed to hear it after playing, not before.
" Elise's fingers turned the stem of her wine glass.
The candlelight caught her face and her expression was thoughtful, the competitive edge from the game still there but tempered now by quiet peace.
"I spent eight weeks terrified that Lex would make me obsolete.
And then I got out there today and the ice was the same ice and my body knew what to do and the team responded to me as they always have, and I thought: why was I so afraid? "
"Because your identity was tied to your performance," Sienna said. "And when the performance was taken away, you had to figure out who you were without it."
Elise raised an eyebrow. "Have you been talking to Helen?"
"Helen helped me see a few things about myself too." Sienna smiled. "The injury took from you. But it gave you back more."
Elise set the glass down. "It gave me you." "I was so scared today. Standing on the bench waiting to go on. I kept thinking, what if my body's forgotten? What if I can't do it anymore?"
Sienna squeezed Elise's hand across the table. "Your body hadn't forgotten."
"No. It hadn't." Elise smiled. The smile faded, her expression turning serious. She reached across the table and took Sienna's hand. Her fingers were warm and rough and they wrapped around Sienna's with a firmness that was both tender and certain.
"I love you," Elise said.
The restaurant sounds faded. The clink of glasses, Lavender's voice at the bar, the music playing low from the speakers.
None of it registered. There was only Elise's face across the table, unguarded and certain, and her hand holding Sienna's, and the three words sitting between them like a door opening.
Sienna's eyes stung. Her throat closed. She thought of Helen's office and the tissue box and the words she'd said there: I don't know how to be loved.
And now Elise was loving her, openly, in a restaurant, and the words were not clinical or analytical or complicated.
They were simple. Three words. And Helen had told her to stop fighting.
"I love you too," Sienna said. Her voice was rough and her eyes were wet and she didn't care. "I love you so much it scares me, Elise. I've been scared of it since the first day."
"I know." Elise's thumb stroked across Sienna's knuckles. "But you don't have to be scared anymore."
Sienna wiped her eyes with the heel of her free hand. "I'm working on it."
"I know that too."
Sienna brought Elise's hand to her lips and kissed her knuckles, one by one. Elise's eyes softened. The restaurant continued around them and neither of them moved.
They walked back to Elise's apartment with their hands linked and the cool evening air carrying the scent of salt and eucalyptus from the trees along the road.
They didn't rush. The walk was slow and quiet and the streetlights cast long pools of amber on the pavement and their shadows stretched out ahead of them, merged at the hands.
Sienna's body was humming. The I-love-yous were still reverberating through her, not fading but settling, becoming part of her, a new load-bearing wall where there'd been empty space before.
Elise kissed her at the corner, slow and wine-warm and certain. A car passed and its headlights swept across them and neither of them pulled away.
In the apartment, Elise kissed her against the front door.
Then against the wall. Then they were in the bedroom and the lights were off and Elise's mouth was on her neck and her hands were undressing Sienna with the focused attention she brought to everything, and Sienna let herself be undressed and let herself be wanted and let herself say "I love you" again with Elise's body pressed against hers in the dark.
The sex was different. Not more intense than before, but deeper, layered with what they'd said at the restaurant.
Sienna was on her back and Elise was above her, inside her, her fingers moving with a rhythm that was slow and devastating, and they were looking at each other in the dark and Sienna kept saying her name, just her name, over and over.
When she came, it was quiet and powerful and she pulled Elise's mouth to hers and kissed her through it.
Then Elise lay back and Sienna went down on her with the confidence she'd been building for weeks, and Elise's body responded to her mouth as if it had been made for it, and Sienna made her come twice, the second time with her fingers and her tongue together, and Elise's hand in her hair and her voice cracking on Sienna's name.
They lay together afterward, tangled in the sheets, breathing hard, the room smelling of sex and salt and the faint lemon of Elise's shampoo. Elise's head was on Sienna's chest and Sienna's fingers were in Elise's damp hair and the silence was full and warm.
“Can you stay tonight,” Elise murmured.
Sienna closed her eyes. The words pulled at her, the familiar gravity of Elise's bed and Elise's body and the fierce, aching want to wake up beside her in the morning.
"I can't tonight." She pressed her lips against the top of Elise's head. "I have an early start. The sports medicine conference in Denver. I need to be at the airport by six."
Elise lifted her head, chin propped on Sienna's sternum. "How long?"
"Two days. Back Friday evening."
Elise groaned and dropped her forehead against Sienna's chest. "That's ages."
"It's forty-eight hours."
"Like I said. Ages." Elise kissed her collarbone. "Drive safe. It's a long way."
"I'm flying to Denver. Early flight out of Phoenix Ridge. It's only twenty minutes to the airport but I need to be there by six."
"Text me when you land. And when you get to the hotel. And before you go to sleep. And when you wake up."
Sienna laughed, her breath warm against Elise's hair. "That's a lot of texting."
Elise's grin was unrepentant. "I'm high maintenance."
"You're the lowest maintenance person I've ever met." Sienna kissed her forehead. "But I'll text you for all of those."
They got up. Sienna dressed in the dark, finding her clothes scattered across the bedroom floor, and Elise watched her from the bed with the sheet pulled to her waist and her hair loose and her eyes heavy-lidded and warm.
At the front door, Sienna kissed her. A long, slow kiss that tasted of wine and sex and I love you. Elise's hand came up to Sienna's face and held her there.
"I love you," Elise said.
Sienna kissed her again instead of answering. Soft and unhurried, her hand against Elise's jaw. Elise leaned into it. She would know.
Sienna walked down the stairs and out into the cool night. The stars were visible above the streetlights. She got into her car and sat for a moment with her hands on the wheel and her heart full and the taste of Elise on her lips.
Two days. She could manage two days.
She started the engine and pulled away from the kerb and drove the short distance home to pack.
The apartment was dark and quiet and still held the faint scent of the coffee she'd made that morning, before Mara's office, before the game, before the three words at the window table in Lavender's that had changed the shape of her life.
She pulled her suitcase from the wardrobe and packed efficiently: conference lanyard, notebooks, two changes of clothes, toothbrush, her reading glasses case.
Her hands moved on autopilot while her mind stayed in the warm glow of Elise's apartment, in the taste of wine on Elise's tongue, in those three words spoken across a table.
I love you. She'd said them and the world hadn't ended.
She'd said them and Elise had said them back.
She'd said them and tomorrow she'd be in another city learning about rotator cuff advances and the words would still be true.
She zipped the suitcase and set the alarm and got into her own bed, which was cold and empty and too big without Elise in it, and fell asleep with her phone on the pillow and Elise's last text glowing on the screen:
Come back to me.