Chapter 4
"Coach talks too much."
"Coach wants you healthy. *I* want you healthy." She paused, working her fingers into the subscapularis, feeling the thick, rubbery tension give way beneath her touch. "Why did you go after Vance, August? Really. No press talk. No 'puck bounced' nonsense."
August didn’t answer for a long time. The only sound was the rhythm of his breathing and the faint rattle of sleet on the glass.
"He's dirty," August said, his voice muffled by the vinyl pillow.
"Half the defensemen in the Western Conference are dirty," she countered, leaning into his lower ribcage. "They don't get targeted from across the neutral zone."
"He hurt people."
"It’s hockey! People get hurt. You can't execute personal vendettas every time an old veteran plays on the line." She softened her stroke, trailing her fingertips lightly up the nape of his neck, feeling the coarse hair at his hairline. "You have to be smarter than that. When you do that, you put everything at risk. Your career. Your contract. Your future."
August slowly turned his head to the side, looking up at her from the cradle. His face was flushed from the heat of the liniment, his dark eyes heavy, dark, and searingly direct.
"Some things matter more than an eight-figure deal," he said.
"Nothing matters more than your health, August. Nothing."
He looked at her with an intensity that made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. "You believe that?"
"I lived it," she whispered, her voice dropping, stripped of its clinical armor. "I lived the morning after the surgery when the doctor told me the nerves were too frayed to ever hold a composite stick at game speed again. I lived through the months where I couldn't open a jar of peanut butter by myself. You have the world at your feet, and you’re treating your body like an old pickup truck you can smash into a wall just to see the sparks."
August shifted his weight. In one smooth, heavy motion, he rolled over onto his back, the vinyl squeaking beneath him.
Fallon took a startled step back, but his hand was already moving. He reached out and caught her right wrist.
He didn't pull her down. He didn't grip hard. He just held her hand suspended in the warm space between them, his thumb sweeping slowly, rhythmically across the thick surgical scar that ran from the base of her index finger down into the meat of her palm.
"They did a bad job on the third knuckle," he said quietly, his voice like gravel in running water. "The surgeon should have used an oblique pin. The straight pin compressed the radial branch."
Fallon froze. Her pulse slammed against the spot his thumb was caressing.
"How do you know that?" she asked, her voice barely audible.
"I read about it," he said simply.
"You read orthopedic surgical textbooks?"
"I read what happened."
He turned her hand over, his calloused palm cradling hers like something made of spun sugar. Slowly, with an excruciating gentleness that made her chest ache until it burned, he pressed the pad of his thumb into the web of skin between her thumb and index finger—the primary acupressure point for carpal tunnel relief.
A sharp, electric release rippled up Fallon's forearm. The chronic, dull ache that had lived in her hand for seven years seemed to slacken, just for a second.
"August," she warned, though there was no strength in her voice.
"You worked on my back for forty minutes," he murmured, his gaze locked onto her fingers as he methodically worked the stiffness out of her joints. "Sit down, Doc. Your hands are cold."
"I'm the therapist. You're the patient."
"Then fire me."
He tugged her hand gently. Not enough to force her, just enough to invite.
Fallon’s knees felt dangerously hollow. She pulled the rolling stool over and sat down beside the table, her shoulder inches from his chest. She should have pulled her hand away. She should have invoked team policy, medical ethics, common sense, self-preservation.
Instead, she let him take both her hands into his.
August placed her hands between his own large, scarred palms, rubbing them briskly to generate heat. His fingers were thick, his knuckles swollen from years of fights, but his touch was astonishingly soft. He worked each of her fingers individually, pulling gently on the joints, stretching the tight scar tissue with the exact pressure she would have used on a recovering pitcher.
"You shouldn't have been in that tunnel," he said, so low she almost thought she imagined it.
Fallon stiffened. The memory flared instantly—the Duluth arena, the smell of damp concrete, the sudden laughter behind her, the heavy weight of a carbon-fiber stick coming down across the small bones of her hands while two men pinned her against the lockers.
"That was a long time ago," she said, trying to pull back.
August held firm. He didn't squeeze, but his fingers interlocked with hers, anchoring her to the present, to the warm, quiet room.
"It wasn't that long ago," he said, his voice dropping into a dark, velvet register. "Seven years is nothing."
"It's an eternity in sports." She looked into his eyes, trying to find the reckless brawler, the meathead enforcer who threw himself into penalty boxes. He wasn't there. There was only a profound, suffocating sorrow—and something colder underneath, something sharp and metallic that she couldn't identify. "I made peace with it, August. I'm a physical therapist. I love what I do. I love this team."
"You loved playing more."
"It doesn't matter what I loved! It's gone!" Her voice cracked, the emotion slipping through the cracks of her discipline. "What matters is that you're throwing your gift away. You do this to yourself, and for what? To be an enforcer? To protect guys who wouldn't pay your medical bills when your knees give out?"
August brought her hands up. For a wild, terrifying moment, she thought he was going to press his lips to her knuckles.
Instead, he held her hands against his chest, right over his heart.
Under her palms, his pulse was slow, deep, and steady as an ocean current. His chest rose and fell with an iron calm.
"I'm not throwing anything away, Fallon," he said softly. "I know exactly what I'm doing."
"Then promise me," she said, leaning closer, her breath brushing his chin. "Tomorrow night, in St. Paul. You sit in the press box. You watch the game like an executive. When your suspension is up on Thursday against Edmonton, you play clean. You skate your shifts. You don't start anything."
August looked at her mouth. His gaze was heavy, heated, sweeping over her parted lips before rising back to meet her eyes. The space between them seemed to shrink until the air was charged with sweet, dangerous heat. If he leaned up three inches, his bruised mouth would meet hers.
She knew she wouldn't pull away. That was the most terrifying part.
"I'll play clean," he whispered.
"Promise me, August."
He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, his jaw tightening. "I promise you I won't take a penalty that doesn't need to be taken."
