16. Ellie
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
ELLIE
By noon, I’d managed to convince myself I had everything together.
I’d treated three other players. Updated their charts. And walked Fedor through his knee exercises with a competence that usually came easily.
Except I wrapped his knee three times before I got the tape tension right.
“Are you alright, Doc?” Fedor asked, watching me unwrap it for the last time.
“Fine. I’m just distracted.”
“Anything I can help with?”
“No. Thanks though.”
I finally got the wrap right and sent him on his way, then stood at the treatment room sink, washing my hands and staring at my reflection in the small mirror above it.
I looked like someone who’d ground herself against Brashe in a therapy pool until she came and hadn’t stopped thinking about it since.
“What’s going on with you?”
I jumped, spinning to find Crim leaning against the doorframe, his arms crossed on his chest, his expression concerned.
“Wow, Crim. Knock next time?”
“I did. You didn’t hear me.” He stepped into the room, his gaze sharpening. “Are you feeling alright?”
“I am. It’s nothing. Just a long day.”
“El.”
“Don’t you have an away game to go to?”
“Not until tomorrow. You know that.”
“Surely you have practice.”
“I do.”
I turned back to the sink, scrubbing my hands even though they were already clean. “Then you should be changing. Getting out on the ice.”
“Fedor said you seemed distracted. Maybe upset.”
Damn Fedor and his big mouth.
“It was nothing.”
“You’d tell me if it was?”
I shrugged.
His eyes narrowed. “Does this have to do with Brashe?”
“Stop right there.” I dried my hands, yanking paper towels from the dispenser harder than necessary. “Whatever else you have to say, just don’t.”
“I’m not going to tell you what to do,” he said carefully.
“Good.”
His sigh rang out. “Brashe’s a good guy. I mean that. But he’s got a lot going on.”
“I know that.”
“Do you? Because he’s spent his whole life thinking he’s only worth what he can do on the ice. And I’ve watched what that does to people.”
“This isn’t… We’re not…” I couldn’t finish the sentence.
“Aren’t you?”
I couldn’t figure out what to say.
Crim was quiet for a long moment, studying my face with the same focus he used to read plays on the ice.
“You know what I see when I look at you right now?” he finally said. “The same expression you had when you were sixteen and that asshole Ryan Kellerman asked you to prom as a joke.”
My spine went rigid. “It’s not the same.”
“You wanted it to be real so badly that you convinced yourself it was. Right up until he didn’t show up, and you found out he’d gone with someone else.
” His voice gentled. “I’m not saying Brashe is Ryan.
I’m saying you have a pattern of seeing the best in people who don’t know what to do with it.
I just don’t want you to get hurt again. ”
“I can handle this.”
“I know you can. That’s not what I’m worried about.” He squeezed my shoulder. “I’m worried you’re going to fall for someone who doesn’t know how to let himself be caught.”
The words didn’t just sit heavy. They sank into my chest, settling somewhere I couldn’t reach to pull them back out.
Because he was right. About Ryan. About the attending physician in my second year who’d complimented my work just enough to keep me hoping he was interested.
About every person I’d convinced myself to believe in because the alternative, that I wasn’t worth their honesty, felt worse.
“What if I already am?” I said quietly.
Crim’s expression softened in that way that made me feel fourteen again, grief-raw and trying to figure out how to exist in a family that wasn’t mine by blood but had chosen me anyway.
“Then I’ll be here when you land,” he said. “But you don’t have to jump just because someone’s finally looking at you the way you’ve always deserved.”
After he left, I stood in the empty treatment room, staring at nothing.
Was Crim right? Was I setting myself up for the picnic all over again, but worse because I now knew who Brashe truly was? I’d felt his hand on my face and heard his voice go soft when he said my name.
I remembered the dismissal. That’s cute.
I remembered this morning and the way he’d looked at me like I was beautiful.
I didn’t know which version was real. Maybe people were capable of care and self-sabotage in equal measure.
Pretty quick, I was going to have to decide if he was worth taking a risk.
I left at 6:30, tired in a bone-deep way that had nothing to do with how many patients I’d seen.
The parking lot was mostly empty, the sun starting to dip below the building’s edge, casting long shadows across the pavement.
I was halfway to my car when I heard footsteps behind me.
“Ellie.”
I turned.
Brashe stood a few feet away, dressed in gray sweatpants and a team hoodie, his hands shoved into his pockets, his expression unreadable.
“Hi,” I said, all I could think of, because my brain had given up on sophisticated vocabulary.
“I laminated it.”
I blinked. “What?”
He pulled the instruction sheet from his hoodie pocket, awkwardly folded. He’d sealed it in plastic, the creases permanent, the paper protected.
“You were right,” he said. “I needed to.”
“I was joking.”
“I wasn’t.”
A laugh bubbled up before I could stop it. “You actually laminated it?”
“I did.” He stepped closer. “And I did the pool work again this afternoon. It felt good. Different than the table work.”
“That’s the point. Buoyancy allows easier range of motion.”
“Very clinical, Dr. Lundrig.”
“I’m a clinical person.”
“Are you?”
I took in the way he was holding himself, careful but hopeful, like he was afraid to want this but couldn’t stop himself.
“I’m trying to be,” I said.
“That makes two of us.”
Silence stretched between us, the kind that felt full instead of empty.
“I’m not sorry about this morning.” His voice dropped lower. “I’m sorry if I made things harder for you. But I’m not sorry it happened.”
“Me neither.” The words came out barely above a whisper.
His face shifted, the careful mask he wore loosening enough that I could see what was underneath. Hope. Fear. The same wanting that had been burning in my chest since he’d touched my temple in the pool.
I needed to get in my car and drive away before I did something stupid like close the distance between us.
Instead, I stood there, staring up at him. “So where does that leave us?”
“I don’t know. I just know I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s…” He glanced past me toward the building. “I should go.”
“Yes.”
But neither of us moved.
Finally, he stepped back. “Goodnight, Ellie.”
“Goodnight.”
He started to turn toward his truck but stopped and looked past me. Crim watched us both. Brashe’s expression didn’t change.
Brashe nodded once.
Crim stared for a long moment, then nodded back.
Brashe walked to his truck without looking my way again.
I got into my car and watched him drive out of the lot.
Crim was gone when I looked back at the entrance.
I sat in my car, touching my temple where the freckle was, where his finger had traced this morning.
Someone knocked on my front door at 10:15 PM.
Marzipan’s head lifted from my lap, her ears swiveling in that direction. I wasn’t expecting anyone. Crim would’ve texted first. Patty was still home with her daughter.
I checked the peephole, and my heart leaped against my ribs.
Brashe stood on my front step, still wearing his team hoodie and sweats, his hands shoved in his pockets. He looked like he’d driven here on autopilot and was only now realizing what he’d done.
I should not open this door. The thought was as clear in my head as if Crim’s voice had taken up residence.
Brashe showing up at my home without texting or calling, just appearing like he needed to see me, overrode everything else.
A romantic gesture I’d have fallen for at sixteen. At twenty. At twenty-five.
But I wasn’t any of those ages anymore. I was twenty-eight, and I’d spent ten months believing he’d rejected me.
My hand went to the deadbolt.
Marzipan meowed, a questioning sound.
“I shouldn’t,” I whispered to her.
I opened the door anyway.
“I know it’s late,” he said. “I know I should wait. I need to prove something to myself. But I just…” He dragged a hand over his face. “Now I’m standing outside your door like a creep because I needed to see you.”
“You’re not a creep.”
“I should’ve texted first.”
“You should come inside.”
His eyes darkened. “Ellie, if I come inside—”
“I know.” This… I was done trying to make all this fit. Perhaps it was time to breathe and see where fate took me.
I stepped back. He stepped forward. The door clicked shut behind him, and he engaged the lock.
We stood in my tiny entryway, close enough that I could feel the heat radiating off him. Marzipan meowed from the couch, unimpressed, then jumped down and stalked toward the bedroom.
His hand came up, cupping my jaw the way he had in the pool. His thumb traced my cheekbone, then the freckle on my temple.
“I’ve been thinking about this spot since the first time I saw it, all the way back at the picnic,” he said. “About kissing it.”
“Then do it.”
He kissed the freckle first. Gentle, as if he was apologizing for every moment since the picnic. Then my forehead. My closed eyelids.
And I let myself have this for a few breaths before I pressed my hand to his chest. “Wait.”
He froze, pulling back enough to meet my eyes. “Too much?”
“No. Yes.” I was still gripping his hoodie as if I’d never let go. “I want this. I do. But Brashe, I can’t. I need to know this isn’t just you trying to fix your guilt about the picnic.”
He blinked. “It’s not.”
“How do I know that?”
“Because I’ve wanted you since before then.
Since the first time Crim showed me a photo of his family, and you were in it, rolling your eyes at the camera.
Since the first time I heard you laugh at one of his jokes.
” He cupped my face again, his thumb tracing my cheekbone.
“I backed away because I was scared. Not because I didn’t want you. Never because of that.”
“I spent ten months thinking I wasn’t enough.”
“I know. And I can’t take that back.” His voice went rough. “But Ellie, you’ve always been more than enough. I was too much of a coward to risk what choosing you might cost.”
The words settled into that hollow space Crim’s conversation had carved out.
“What changed?” I asked.
“I watched you work. Watched you refuse to give up on me even when I gave you every reason to. You’re brilliant and competent and so sure of yourself that it made me realize—” He stopped, his jaw working. “I was more scared of losing the chance than I was of what it might cost anymore.”
I kissed him but kept it soft. Careful. A promise, not a claiming. When I pulled back, his eyes had darkened.
“I need time,” I said. “Not a lot. But enough to know this is real.”
He exhaled, something that might’ve been relief or disappointment or both. “Alright.”
“You’re not angry?”
“Why would I be? You’re protecting yourself. That’s the smartest thing either of us has done since the pool.”
“Stay anyway?” The words slipped out. “Just to sleep. I don’t want you to leave yet.”
“I’d like that.”
“My cat, Marzipan, will judge you all night, but the bed’s more comfortable than the couch.”
“I can handle cat judgment.”
We ended up in my bed, him wearing his underwear, me my pajamas, tangled together underneath the blankets. He kept one arm around my waist, his face buried in my hair.
He fell asleep first, his breathing evening out.
I stayed awake longer, my hand resting on his arm.
Tomorrow, everything would get more complicated. But tonight, we had this. And maybe that could be enough.
For now.