Ella
Susan turns the volume up on the waiting room TV, and I hear Bernard's name before I see his face.
"—Houser listed as week-to-week with a lower body injury. The Fury forward went down during practice yesterday and did not travel with the team for their three-game road swing through Carolina and Florida—"
I grab the edge of the nurses' station. The screen shows Bernard in his jersey, skating, whole and healthy, with a red graphic that says INJURED stamped across the bottom.
"Isn't that your brother's teammate?” Susan nods at the TV. "MCL, sounds like. I should look him up in the system to see if he’s having surgery here.”
I ignore Susan’s faux-privacy-violation threats and pull out my phone to text Bernard.
Are you okay?? I just saw the news.
Nothing. No dots. No response.
I text Jason.
What happened to Bernard?
Three minutes later, my brother says,
Yeah he tweaked his knee. He's fine.
I stare at the word "fine" and want to throw my phone at the vending machine with my brother's face on it.
"Fine" is the word Jason uses for everything — fine when he offered me a couch, fine when he didn't pick me up from the airport, fine when his best friend apparently hurt a ligament and is lying alone in their apartment.
The rest of my shift is a blur. I cycle between patients and my phone, checking for a response from Bernard that never comes.
My brain fills the silence with clinical information I didn't know I'd retained: MCL sprains are graded 1 through 3.
Grade 1 is mild, microscopic tears, one to three weeks.
Grade 2 is a partial tear, four to six weeks.
Grade 3 is a full rupture and surgery. Treatment includes ice, compression, elevation.
Limited weight-bearing. No lateral movement.
I know the anatomy. I know the rehab protocol. I know what an MCL does — because I've been studying it on a laptop and in a car with a man who turns medical terminology into foreplay.
What I don't know is how bad it is, whether he's in pain, whether anyone is with him, or whether he's eaten.
I clock out at seven-thirty, skip the bus, and spend Jason's remaining money on a ride share that gets me home in twelve minutes.
The apartment is dim. Jason's door is open, and his room is stripped: road bag gone, open closet half-empty. He's long gone. The living room is quiet except for the TV on low volume, playing something Bernard clearly isn't watching.
He's on the couch. Not casually lounging.
Genuinely immobilized. His right knee is wrapped in a compression sleeve and propped on a foam wedge, with a melted ice pack draped across it, doing absolutely nothing therapeutic.
He's in mesh shorts and a Fury T-shirt that's wrinkled like he slept in it.
His curls are matted on one side. He looks exhausted, bored, and a little defeated.
"Hey," he says, looking up when I come in.
"You didn't text me back."
"My phone died. Charger's in the kitchen and I can't—" He gestures at his knee.
I grab his charger from the counter, plug in his phone, and set it on the ottoman beside a glass of water that looks like it's been sitting there for hours. Then I crouch beside the couch and start unwrapping his knee.
"Ella, what the—”
"This ice pack is room temperature. When did you last swap it?"
"I don't know. Trainer set me up after PT and then—"
“Hours ago?” I peel back the compression sleeve and examine his knee. Swollen, warm to the touch, bruised along the medial side. I palpate gently, and he hisses. "Sorry. Can you bend it?"
"Some." He mumbles something about NSAIDs and grade one sprains while I poke around his knee.
I rewrap it properly, snug but not tight, the way I'd do it for a patient. I go to the freezer and grab a fresh gel pack, slide it carefully inside the wrap, and press it against the swollen joint. My hands know what they're doing. This is my language: injury, care, competence.
Bernard watches me work as if nobody has ever fussed over him like this.
I look at this enormous man on the couch — rumpled, grateful, soft-eyed, watching me with his busted knee elevated.
His curls are a disaster. A thought arrives fully formed: St. Bernard.
The rescue dog. Huge, gentle, bred to find people lost in the snow and carry them somewhere warm.
He's been doing search and rescue on me since the airport, hauling me out of snowdrifts I didn't even know I was buried in.
His voice croaks as he says, “My dad is irate. Says I’m throwing away my career by skipping ice time.”
I hum a response. The Housers have always been hard on him. Even Jason, who has the emotional intelligence of a helmet, has mentioned that a few times through the years. Bernard’s dad played in the pros, too, but his career was cut short after some sort of scandal. Bernard doesn’t talk about it.
"Have you eaten?" I ask.
"I had a protein bar a while ago.”
"Bernard, you are a finely tuned machine. You need fuel.”
"I can't really get to the kitchen."
I stand and smirk. “Want me to heat up some bison balls for us to share?”
He guffaws. “I don’t know if that sounds appetizing, but there’s takeout from Gianna’s if you don’t mind getting that for me?”
I pop the food in the oven and rush through a shower before bringing my patient a bowl with a fork and a fresh glass of water. He eats sitting up, his leg still elevated, and I perch on the edge of the ottoman, facing him, because all the chairs are too far away and I want to be close.
"Thank you," he says between bites. "You didn't have to do all this."
"You drove me to work every day for two weeks. I think I can manage an ice pack."
He smiles. Eats another meatball. Then, with the careful tone of a man navigating a field of landmines: "So. Jason's gone."
"I noticed."
"For at least five days."
"I'm aware."
He sets the bowl down. "Ella, I've been thinking."
"Dangerous."
"About the whole … tutoring situation." He rubs the back of his neck. "The plan was to prepare you for the right guy, and I just realized, you were out at a bar with us the other night. With Spinner and Mayhem and a room full of available men. And you didn't … you know. Try to meet anyone.”
I stare at him. "You're asking me why I didn't pick up a man at the bar?”
"I'm asking why you didn't take the opportunity to—"
"To what? Flirt with someone in front of my brother's teammates?
" I lean back. "Bernard, that's literally why I’m a forty-year-old virgin.” He opens his mouth to argue about my age, but I hold up a palm.
“Every guy I ever talk to gets scared off by Jason or his teammates.
I can't go looking for a man in the same circles where my brother has already posted a 'don't touch my sister' sign. "
He opens his mouth again, but closes it this time. I can see him processing, the closed loop of my brother's world, the way it shrinks my options to zero.
“So what’s your plan to meet your man?” he asks.
"When? Between my twelve-hour shifts and my studying? When exactly am I meeting this mythical right guy?"
Bernard snorts. “Not at clown college, that’s for sure." He shifts on the couch, wincing as his knee protests while his words sting me. "I still don't get why you didn't just try a normal sport."
The words land differently than he intends them. I can tell by the casual way he says it — the same way Jason would say it, the same way my dad would say it. Like it's a joke.
"When would I have learned a sport, Bernard?"
His face changes.
"My entire childhood was hockey. Jason's hockey.
His practices, his games, his tournaments, his showcases.
Every weekend. Every summer. Every family vacation was actually a hockey camp disguised as a trip.
" I keep my voice level because this isn't anger, it's just fact.
"I did my homework in the back of the car.
I ate dinner in arena parking lots. My dad spent every spare dollar on ice time, private coaching, and travel fees, and my mom spent every spare hour driving us to his development activities.
There wasn't time for me to do a sport. There wasn't money for me to do a sport. I was an accessory.”
Bernard stares at me. I watch the realization move across his face like fog off the Allegheny River. He was IN that car. He was one of the hockey boys who took up the space. He just never looked at it from my side of the backseat.
"The silks are the first hobby I have ever chosen for myself," I say. "The first activity I have done because I wanted to, not because someone else's schedule required me to be somewhere adjacent to it. So no, I didn't try a normal sport. I was too busy being a passenger in someone else's life."
He's quiet for a long time. His jaw works. I can see him re-processing — every childhood memory, every carpool, every tournament where I sat in the stands with a textbook while he and Jason played the game that mattered.
"I'm sorry," he says.
“Don’t worry about it."
The silence between us is heavy but not hostile. It's the stillness of something settling into place, a joint clicking back into alignment.
I look at his knee. My hand is still resting on the ice pack, holding it against the joint. My fingers curve over the edge of the wrap, touching the bare skin of his thigh beneath the hem of his shorts.
I don't move my hand. Neither does he.
“So anyway, I still need to learn the arts of love,” I say.
His eyes drop to my hand on his leg. "Ella…"
I slide my hand an inch higher on his thigh. His quad tenses under my palm. “If you’re not in pain, this seems like a good time for extra credit.” The leg muscles quiver beneath my hand. I hold his gaze. "Teach me how to make you feel good, Bernard."
His throat moves. I watch him swallow, watch his hands grip the couch cushion, watch the war play out across his features — the part of him that wants to keep giving and never receive versus the part of him that's been turning this down since our first lesson.
"You don't have to…"
"I know I don't have to. I want to." I move my hand higher. His breath stutters. "You've been taking care of me since I got to Pittsburgh. Driving me. Feeding me. Teaching me. Let me take care of you."
He looks at me. I look at him. The apartment is silent except for the hum of the refrigerator and the distant horn of a barge on the river.
He exhales long and shaky, accepting. "Come here."
I move from the coffee table to the couch, settling beside him on his uninjured side.
He angles toward me, one hand coming up to cup my face, and kisses me.
Slow at first, then deeper, his thumb tracing my jaw, and I taste the meatball sauce on his lip and feel the familiar rush of heat that Bernard's mouth generates in my bloodstream.
"Okay," he says against my lips. "Lesson."
"Lesson."
“You ever touch a wiener before?”
“Bernard! Wiener?” I laugh as his thumb rubs along my neck.
He smiles, so adorable. “I take it that’s a no?”
I arch a brow. “Not one I wanted to put in my mouth.”
He laughs the private Bernard laugh that cracks open his whole face. "Okay. Great, well, a penis is pretty straightforward. There’s really no way you’re going to be bad at this.”
I glance down, and his crotch twitches under my gaze.
He’s quiet as he reaches into his waistband and pulls his shorts down.
That thick, beautiful cock springs out at full attention, looking absolutely incredible and, yeah.
Delicious. I decide I’m going to take him into my mouth, not just stroke him to completion.
He guides me. Verbally at first — what to do with my hand, how to grip, where the sensitive spots are.
His voice is steady, instructional, the same tone he uses when quizzing me.
I start with my hand around him, learning the shape and weight of him, the way his breathing changes when I adjust pressure.
"That's — yeah." His head tips back against the couch. "A little tighter. So good."
I pay attention, focused. Bernard makes sounds that send shock waves through my pajama pants, and his hand flaps on my shoulder like he is seizing.
I bend at the waist, stick out my tongue, and taste the salty tip of his dick where the foreskin retracted.
He emits a noise, and it’s so hot I know I’ll never forget the sound.
Same with the groan from the night he climbed into bed with me.
I glide my fist down and swirl the flat of my tongue around his tip.
"Ella — fuck — you don't—"
"Teach me," I say, and he moans. I don’t wait for instruction. I somehow know what to do here, with Bernard’s cock in my mouth.
I want to make this man feel what he made me feel, to draw those sounds from him, to make his face contort in pleasure.
And I see now how very good it feels to make someone else feel good.
I lower my mouth around his shaft and feel the gentle weight of his palm on my head, his fingers in my hair. I glance up and see his composure is gone. His hips jut up from the cushions. His face is a mess, neck tendons flexed. It’s the most erotic thing … I’m overcome with an urge to touch myself.
I like this. I like the power of it. I like that Bernard Houser, who has been so controlled, so careful, so focused on my pleasure, is coming apart under my hands and my mouth. I like that I'm doing this to him. I slide a hand down the front of my pants just to take the pressure off while I work.
His voice is a sob. “Ella, I'm going to—you should—"
I don't pull away. I want this. I want to taste him, feel him shoot into my mouth.
And oh, he does. He comes with my name on his lips and his hand clenched in my hair and an expression on his face that I have seen only once before, in the window of the aerial studio, when I looked up in triumph and felt, for the first time, powerful.
He's breathing hard. His eyes are closed. I swallow and release his still-hard cock. His hand loosens in my hair and slides down to my cheek, cradling my face with a tenderness that almost undoes me.
"Where the hell did you learn that?" he whispers.
"You just taught me."
"I taught you some basics. That was not a 101 blowie.”
I sit up, wiping my mouth, trying to look composed and probably failing. "I told you. I'm a fast learner when someone teaches me the right way."
He pulls me against his side, careful of his knee, and wraps his arm around me. I tuck my head against his chest and listen to his heart — slowing, the percussion of a man returning to baseline. My hand rests on his stomach. His hand rests in my hair.
Neither of us says anything about tutoring. Neither of us mentions the right guy.
"Your ice pack needs swapping," I eventually murmur against his chest.
"In a minute."
"In a minute it'll have been too long."
"Ella."
"What?"
"Just … stay here for now."
His heart beats against my ear. His fingers trace slow circles on my shoulder. The apartment is warm and dark and quiet, and it feels, for one dangerous moment, like home.