8. Maren
MAREN
The thing about working with someone you were trying not to think about was that, according to the rules of karma, the job required you to think about them constantly.
Not the way I wanted to think about him.
Not the hair tuck or the corridor or the low register of his voice when he’d said I didn’t exactly leave the room when I’d had to lock my knees to stay in place or fall over completely.
The regular, professional thinking about Ryan Lindqvist that my job demanded every single day.
His shoulder. His sleep schedule, flagged in a staff meeting as something to monitor.
His nutrition log, which he kept more diligently than almost anyone on the roster.
He was the most self-disciplined person I’d worked with in four years of sports medicine, which was either admirable or maddening depending on the hour.
I lay awake on Wednesday night telling myself I was reviewing treatment protocols.
I was not reviewing anything but the memories of him barely touching me, his hand grazing my cheek. All of it.
Thursday. Eight o’clock. He knocked on the open door and came in, and when I looked up he was almost smiling, which on Ryan Lindqvist was the equivalent of anyone else walking in grinning.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey.” He set his water bottle on the counter. “You ready for Saturday?”
San Jose. My first road trip with the team, which I’d been trying not to think about too hard because every time I did I remembered I’d be on a charter with forty people including him for two hours each way, and that was a lot of proximity for someone who was actively managing her space from the captain.
“Absolutely,” I said. “Shirt off, lie back.”
He pulled his T-shirt over his head and sat on the edge of the table. “First road trip with the team?”
“First one. The medical staff are rotating, so we’re all taking turns.”
“It’s pretty similar to here. Just not your own equipment.” He sat back on his hands. “Nothing to worry about.”
“Good to know.”
The corner of his eye creased. Then he lay back, one arm behind his head, and found the ceiling, and I got to work.
I positioned myself at the head of the table and started the assessment, moving his arm through rotation with both hands, watching for the places where his breath shifted even when he was working to hide it.
“Still tight here,” I said, pressing into the restriction.
“A little.”
“Did you ice it after practice yesterday?”
Silence.
I dropped my gaze to him. He was studying the ceiling with great focus. “Ryan.”
“I meant to.”
“The tissue is aware you meant to. It’s unimpressed.” I worked through it with slightly more intention than strictly necessary. “What happened instead?”
“Film review ran long.”
“You sat for two hours watching video with a shoulder you were supposed to be icing.” I pressed into the posterior capsule and felt him control the response. “You could have iced it during that same two hours.”
“When you say it like that—”
“How would you like me to say it?”
“Less accurately.”
I bit the inside of my cheek. “Ice it tonight. Twenty minutes. Set a timer.”
“I’m not setting a timer for icing.”
“Then I’m calling you.”
He turned his head and caught my eye. “You wouldn’t.” He raised a brow and I met him back with glare.
“Look. You’re the captain. The whole roster takes your lead.
If you ignore my instructions, they ignore my instructions, and then I have a locker room full of untreated injuries and a job I can’t do.
” I held his gaze. “So yes. I’d call you at nine o’clock on a Thursday and ask if you iced your shoulder.
I’d do it cheerfully and without hesitation. ”
He turned back to the ceiling and exhaled through his nose, as close to sheepish as he apparently got. “I mean, I’m not opposed to the top tier service and a phone call, but I get it. Fine. Timer.”
“Thank you.” I moved to work the upper trapezius, standing behind him, which was a position I’d been in before and was going to handle exactly the same way.
Clinically, professionally, with my full attention on the tissue and not on the back of his neck or the breadth of his shoulders or the fact I knew precisely how he sounded when the tension released.
I pressed my thumbs in and he inhaled again.
There it was.
“How’s the sleep?” I asked, because talking was better than the alternative, which was silence and the two of us alone in a treatment room while I had my hands on him.
“Fine.”
“Better answer, please.” He couldn’t see me, but I was smiling.
“Five or six hours.”
“That’s not enough.” I worked deeper, tracing the restriction. “What’s keeping you up?”
He paused. The slight shift in his breathing told me he was deciding what to say. “Captain stuff.”
“General existential pressure about leading a franchise in its inaugural season.”
“Yeah.”
“Very manageable.” I found the knot and worked it, slow and deliberate, felt the muscle yield under my thumbs. “Have you considered talking to someone about it? We have a sports psych on staff.”
“I’m talking to you.”
I stilled for only a moment. “I mean professionally.”
“I know what you meant.”
I kept working. Outside I could hear the faint sound of skates on ice from the rink and the distant bass of whatever Cole was playing in the locker room, and in here it was this.
My hands, his shoulder, and the quality of silence between two people who had things they weren’t saying.
I’d stopped pretending I couldn’t feel it.
“You’re my second favorite patient,” I said, because I needed to say something and this was safe.
“Second?” He turned his head. I gave him a tight lipped smile and a shrug.
“Eli set a very high bar.”
“What does second get me?”
“More patience when you don’t ice your shoulder.
” I came around to face him and the reminder of what a distraction he was.
Right there, close, looking up at me with those blue-gray eyes.
“Almost done.” I was affected by him in the same way I always was, but there was also an ease establishing between us.
“Take your time,” he said. I looked back down at my clipboard and finished the assessment with focused professionalism.
I walked him through two modifications on the exercise sheet, demonstrating, and he watched my hands the whole time. Not my face. My hands. Why is that so sexy?
“Same time next week,” I said.
He took the sheet, studied it, then looked at me, and I thought, not for the first time and not for the last, about what it would be like if none of the reasons to stay away were reasons at all.
If Griffin weren’t Griffin. If I didn’t work here.
If we had met some other way in some other life and there was nothing stopping either of us from just kissing in a kitchen and seeing what happened next.
“Thanks, Maren,” he said.
“Don’t forget the ice.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied, then gave a slight wave, and a wink as he left my office.
I stood in the treatment room after the door closed and breathed for a minute.
I stared at the ceiling and had it completely under control.
The Sidewinders beat San Jose 3–2 in overtime.
Ryan got the winner at four minutes on a feed from Cole, top corner, clean as anything.
I was on the bench and I knew before it happened.
I’d watched him do it in practice enough times to recognize how he set his feet, the weight transfer, the almost imperceptible pause, and I had half a second to think yes before the puck hit the net and the arena noise arrived all at once like a wave breaking.
Griffin came all the way from the other end of the ice and grabbed Ryan around the neck, and Ryan caught his arm and held on.
On his way off the ice Ryan peered through the glass and found me and winked.
It went directly to my core and took up residence there.
I was still buzzing on the plane home. I was sitting between Griffin and Ryan at Griffin’s insistence.
Part of me thought he didn’t want me sitting with any other guys from the team, but we were also chatting a bunch before takeoff.
Griffin and Ryan always sat together. Griffin had the window, obviously I had the middle, Ryan had the aisle because he needed the legroom.
Griffin talked through the overtime save sequence in technical, loving detail until somewhere over Nevada he decided he was done, headphones on, ball cap pulled low, asleep inside three minutes the way he’d been able to sleep anywhere since we were kids.
Griffin passing out left me four inches from Ryan Lindqvist in the low hum of a red-eye cabin with nowhere to look that wasn’t him or the seat back in front of me.
I pulled out my Kindle.
I was four chapters into The Long Way to Lakeview, which I’d been saving for a travel day, and I’d hit the scene where the hero finally said the thing we’d all been waiting for him to say for two hundred pages when I became aware that Ryan was reading my screen.
Not obviously. Just there. I felt it before I saw him.
I tilted the Kindle slightly toward him without looking up. “Do you want to read it or just hover?”
“Dani Cade,” he said.
I turned to look at him. “You know her books,” I said.
“My mom and Anna had a theory. About what men needed to read to understand women.” He said it without any defensiveness, which made it funnier. “They were right.” He shrugged.
He reached into the bag under the seat in front of him and came up with a paperback.
The Innkeeper’s Terrible Idea by Cal Beckett, the cover a watercolor of a snow-covered building with warm light in the windows.
The spine was cracked in three places. There was a boarding pass stub sticking out somewhere in the middle.
I considered it for a moment, then looked at him. “Small town.”
“Small town,” he confirmed.
“I cannot decide if that’s the most or least surprising thing about you.”
“I find it restful.” He set it on his knee. “You read sports romance.”
“Obviously.”
“How’s the accuracy?”