Chapter 15
CASH
December
“Again,” he said.
I glared up at Thad from the exercise mat on his living room floor.
The look would’ve sent most people searching for safer ground.
It had worked on teenage pricks and hockey players alike my whole damn life.
It did not work on Thad. He merely crossed his arms over his chest and stared back at me.
Meanwhile, I lay flat on my back with my right leg locked straight inside the brace.
“Uh…is this a trick? Because I’m pretty sure the physical therapist said three sets of ten, and that was ten.”
“She did, and it was not. That was nine.”
“It was ten,” I argued.
“Nope. It was nine. It would’ve been ten, but you half-assed your way through number six.”
“I’ve never half-assed anything, Doc. I paused.”
“Nope. You dropped your leg to the floor. You half-assed it.”
“I did not half-ass anything. I lowered it fast.”
“Nine. You dropped it.”
“Ten.”
“If you do another one, we’ll call that one ten.”
I narrowed my eyes. “I hate you.”
“No, you don’t.”
“No, I fucking don’t,” I muttered. This back and forth between us had developed over the weeks since my surgery.
Our bantering and bickering was a version of foreplay, at least for me. It turned me on like nothing else when he challenged me at every turn. He cheered for me too, but not to the detriment of my health or recovery.
“Fine,” I said, tightening my quads and lower abs as I glared at him.
He glared back with a smug smile and…
Yep. A cock that pressed against his gray sweatpants.
I smirked as I lifted my leg. The movement was slow, but the leg came up. My knee stayed straight inside the brace as my heel hovered several inches above the floor. The muscles in my abdomen and along my leg burned, but the ones on the front of my thigh were a raging inferno.
But…
They held.
No shaking.
No sharp stabbing inside the joint.
None of the weaknesses I’d experienced in the year since the injury that had made my leg feel detached from the rest of my body.
“Hold,” Thad said, his held-out hand a silent echo of his command.
I stared at the ceiling, my eyes watering from forcing myself to focus and not blink. The breath I held hissed through clenched teeth when I could no longer keep it in. When the last of the air escaped, I gnashed my teeth until they felt close to exploding.
“Three…two…one,” he counted down, his hand lowering as he did.
Half a beat I waited, then lowered the…my leg—I corrected, trying to retrain my brain to include it as part of who Cash Benjamin was—without letting it fall.
“Perfect,” he said, with that big-ass toothpaste-commercial smile making the word hit somewhere deeper than it should have.
Perfect.
My surgery had been perfect. Thad said the same while I was too drugged and sick to understand what it might mean.
In the weeks since, I’d strived to drag the word out of him again and again.
He’d apparently removed it from his vocabulary, and that made me want to do something impressive to please him. Or drop to my knees and suck his dick.
“That’s two.”
“Yes, three complete, perfect sets.”
I smiled, rolled up, looping my arms around my bent left leg. “And that’s three.”
“What are you going on about?” he asked, holding out my water bottle while gulping from his own.
“Blowjobs,” I said when he lowered the bottle.
His face turned red as he coughed and sputtered and called me a menace and a troublemaker. I smirked, rolled onto my back, lifted my braced leg from the floor, rolled onto my left foot, and stood.
“What the flying fuck was that? Are you trying to give me a heart attack?” Thad asked, grabbing hold of me.
My hands found his shoulders, while mine shrugged. “A pistol squat,” I said, leaning over to grab my crutches. “No, definitely not. I plan to deliver on the blow jobs. And get a few of my own in return.”
He shook his head. “Don’t do that anymore, okay?”
I sighed and nodded. “Yes, Doc.” His eyes bugged, and I giggled at how comical he looked. “I promise.”
“Thank you.”
“So…the sets, the progression…are you happy?” I asked, moving to the couch to stretch out, knowing he’d want to check my leg.
Something flickered across Thad’s face before Dr. Vale buried it. “Cautiously encouraged.”
“Oh, fuck off.”
He laughed and sat beside me on the couch. “How does it feel?” he asked.
I smirked. “Like I just did thirty-one straight-leg raises.”
“Thirty.” He reached for the straps of my brace. “Pain?”
“Two,” I replied. The knee hurt. It always fucking hurt, but I played elite-level hockey for well over a decade. I knew pain. Sometimes I welcomed it because it made me feel alive.
“Cash.”
I rolled my eyes. “Two and a half.”
His fingers stopped against the first strap.
I let him wait a second. “Three. Maybe.”
“Sharp, aching, or burning?”
“Mostly tight. A little achy around the front. Nothing inside the joint.”
“And before you started?”
“A one.”
He loosened the brace enough to examine my knee. Three weeks ago, I could barely make out the shape of the damn thing beneath all the dressings. The few times I did see it, the swelling worried the fuck out of me.
Now…the incisions had closed, the bruising had faded, and my kneecap had started looking like part of a human body again. My body.
But…it was still swollen. I knew that without Thad telling me. It had been swollen before physical therapy this morning, and it still was when I’d laid down on the mat. The good news…? It hadn’t ballooned. It wasn’t hot to the touch.
And that meant the joint hadn’t become inflamed when asked to do something new. Unlike last time, when every ask resulted in the joint ballooning up.
Thad pressed carefully along the joint line. He watched my face instead of his hand, as if he could catch the pain before I felt it.
His thumb reached the inside of my knee, and I tightened my jaw. “Tender?”
I nodded. “A little.”
“Here?” he asked and pressed again.
“Yeah.”
He shifted his thumb. “Here?”
“No.”
His hand kept moving around my knee, checking the same places he’d checked every day since bringing me home.
Fuck! This was not my home. Even if my subconscious and the man currently poking and prodding at my knee said it was.
“Cash? Did that hurt?”
“No,” I said, taking a deep breath.
Thad was way too perceptive. I’d complained about his hovering during the first week.
Sometime during the second, I’d stopped arguing and started stretching my leg across his lap while we watched television at night.
And last week, his hand had curled around my ankle, his thumb rubbing back and forth.
Neither of us mentioned the change or acknowledged when it became normal.
The measuring tape wrapped around my knee. This was becoming a new normal for us. He’d measure the knee in a few spots, and then he’d check it against the tablet that was always on the ottoman next to him.
Today was no different from the previous times we’d done this. At least not until his expression shifted.
Microscopically.
Most people wouldn’t have noticed. Same as most people wouldn’t have noticed the shift my face made a few moments ago.
But the two of us had been pretty well attached at the hip since my surgery, so I’d spent enough time watching Thaddeus Vale to recognize the subtle change at the corner of his mouth.
“What?” I asked, looking between his face, my knee, and the tablet.
A shake of his head, a twitch of his mouth that turned the corners down, followed by, “Nothing.”
“Don’t do that, Doc. You’ve got the face. Tell me what’s going on.”
“What face?” he asked, his eyes flicking up to mine, then back to the tablet.
With a finger under his chin, I lifted his face, ducking mine to force him to meet my gaze. “The one you get when you’re trying not to tell me something.”
“I don’t have a face.”
“Don’t lie. You have a shit ton of faces, Doc. That one’s the closest Dr. Vale gets to smiling.”
He sat back. “The swelling is down. It’s minuscule…”
Minuscule. Tiny. Small. Infinitesimal.
Everything inside me went still.
“After we added the extra flexion yesterday? And all the leg raises?”
“Yes.”
“And no swelling?”
“It’s swollen. It will be for a while.”
My head dropped to the back of the couch. “Jesus, Doc. I know that. What I’m asking is, it didn’t swell more, right?”
“No. It didn’t swell more.”
The grin pulled at my mouth before I could stop it. “It went down.” The words mirrored the surprise that made my insides feel like a bouquet of balloons. “It’s working.”
His expression tightened, and he shook his head. “Cash.”
“No, Doc. Don’t ‘Cash’ me. The knee handled the progression.”
“It handled one very small progression over one twenty-four-hour period.”
“Right, but last time…” I paused to swallow around the emotion that clogged my throat. “Last time my knee couldn’t even handle that.”
I remembered every failure from my last recovery.
Every exercise that had left my knee swollen and throbbing.
Every time the physical therapist had reduced my workload and told me we would try again after the inflammation settled.
Every step forward that had turned into two steps back until the team decided I had nowhere left to go.
This time was different.
I could feel it.
“The response is encouraging,” Thad said carefully. “It tells us we can continue with the current protocol.”
“And progress it.”
“When your therapist determines you’re ready.”
“You just said it handled this.”
“It did.”
“So why do you look like you’re about to tell me my dog died?”
“You don’t have a dog.”
“Thad.”
He sighed. Beyond him and the wall of glass, the Pacific crashed against the rocks below the house. The morning was cold enough that he’d left the doors closed, but the muted roar of the ocean still reached us.
I waited.
I’d gotten better at it over the last three weeks. Not good. But better.
“You’re doing well,” he said. “Your incisions have healed. Your pain is controlled. Your range of motion is where I want it. Your quad is waking up, and so far, the knee is tolerating the exercises without the swelling pattern the knee presented after the last surgeries.”
“But?”