Page 71 of The Grumpy Defenseman
The contact went through me before I could file it under medical necessity.
His palms were broad against my sides. His thumbs rested just abovemy waistband, not moving, which somehow made them harder to ignore. He was shirtless in my kitchen, bruised and exhausted, sitting still because I had told him to, and my body was having several opinions I did not have time to organize.
“This is going to suck,” I said.
“I assumed.”
I pressed the ice to the bruise.
His whole body went rigid.
Not dramatically, which somehow made it worse. Just one long, silent locking down from spine to thighs, the reflex of a man who had spent half his life teaching himself not to make a sound when something hit bone.
His fingers tightened at my hips.
Not enough to hurt.
Enough to tell the truth.
I looked at him and felt something split clean through me.
He was still trying to protect me from the sight of his pain.
That was the insane part.
Not that he was hurt. That he was hurt and still thought my comfort mattered more than his body did.
“Jesus,” I muttered. “You have got to stop doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“Acting like pain is a private language.”
His fingers tightened once more, then eased.
I held the ice there. Counted breaths because without something practical to do, I was going to kiss him or yell at him or both, and neither was medically appropriate.
One.
Two.
Three.
By eight, the line of his mouth softened from endurance into fatigue.
By twelve, his forehead dropped against my sternum.
By fifteen, my free hand was in his hair without either of us deciding whenit got there.
The condo hummed around us. Refrigerator. Traffic somewhere below. The ordinary noises of a city carrying on while I stood barefoot in my kitchen with a half-frozen defenseman leaning into me like his body had finally run out of ways to pretend it did not need anything.
His breath moved against my shirt.
Slow. Warm. Uneven.
I looked down at the top of his head, at the dark strands threaded through my fingers, at the slope of his bare shoulders under the kitchen light. There was something almost worse about this than the training office. That had been heat and urgency and a desk that was still probably traumatized. This was quieter. No door shut against the world. No excuse of adrenaline.
Just Evan sitting between my hands and letting me take care of him.
