Page 70 of The Grumpy Defenseman
This was medical.
This was responsible.
This was also extremely unfair lighting for a medical assessment.
The bruise spread along his right ribs in ugly shades of purple and yellow, half-hidden under old scar tissue. It looked like a storm had moved through him and leftevidence behind.
“Oh, my God.”
“It’s fine.”
I looked up at him. “You are a terrible person to know.”
“That seems dramatic.”
“You played a full game on that.”
“I finished the game.”
“Those are not the same sentence.”
He reached for the takeout bag with his left hand, which told me everything I needed to know about how badly he wanted this conversation to be over.
I slapped his hand away.
“Sit down.”
“Sam.”
“Sit.”
There were moments in life when men like Evan McKinney forgot they were bigger than you.
This was one of mine.
He sat.
Good.
I went for the freezer. Ice pack. Dish towel. Anti-inflammatories from my seconddrawer, because apparently falling for a hockey player required emergency infrastructure.
When I turned back, he was watching me with that look he got when I moved too fast for him to interrupt effectively.
“What?”
“You get bossy when you’re worried.”
“You get stupid when you’re hurt. We all contain multitudes.”
That almost got me a smile.
Almost.
I wrapped the ice pack in the dish towel and stepped between his knees.
His hands landed automatically at my hips.
Not pulling. Not asking for anything. Just there, warm and steady, like some part of him knew exactly where to go when the rest of him was failing.
