Page 8 of Top Shelf

I feel the corner of my mouth twitch.

“Did you just almost smile?”

“No.”

“You did.” She laughs. “I felt it.”

“You cannot see my mouth. You felt nothing.”

“I’m pressed against your back on a motorcycle named Priscilla, Viktor. I’m receiving a lot of sensory information against my will.”

The light ahead turns yellow, and I decide to slow down instead of slipping through like I usually would, because Heidi is already afraid and pretending hard enough that she is not. Her hands tighten the moment the bike shifts beneath us, then loosen again immediately, as though she’s annoyed by her own survival instinct.

She does this often. In rooms and conversations. When someone gets too close to something too raw, she will cover it with humor or a flash of teeth. I learned it first in physical therapy, when she could tell from a bad answer where the pain was sitting in my knee. I learned it later again at team brunches, charity events, and in Carina and Reid’s backyard.

She is very bad at pretending, but I like this about her. It is not a weakness.

The man at the crash thought it was. He looked at her pink clothes and her coffee stain and her moving mouth and decided she would be easy to manipulate.

Stupid man.

Heidi was my physical therapist once, but she has not been for a long time. Still, when her fingers flex against my stomach, I remember her hands on my leg during my rehab. Professional hands, then. Merciless when they needed to be.

She never cared that I was big, or paid to stop men from getting where they wanted to go on the ice. Pain and stubbornness do not impress her. The only thing that impresses Heidi Grant is effort.

“You’re suspiciously quiet,” she says.

“I am driving.”

“Hm, feels like brooding.”

“I do not brood.”

She scoffs into the speaker, and I take the corner. The movement rocks her harder into me, causing her helmet to bump against the back of mine, and she makes a muffled noise.

“Sorry,” she mutters. “I’m not usually this bad at being a passenger.”

“It is okay. Your brain is full. Like a jar of bugs.”

A beat passes in my helmet. “Rude.”

“It is true.”

“It can be both.”

Yes. It can.

I know about her busy mind because I have paid attention when I should have been doing other things. Stretching after a game and listening to Chase tell a story that did not need as many expletives as he thought it did. Answering Reid’s questions at a brunch where Heidi sat on the grass with Carina and baby Ivy, along with Zoe and Lulu, and talked about the studio space beside the Moreno Clinic.

She had not known I was listening. Or maybe she had but did not care. Heidi notices too much for me to trust that she misses anything important.

“What does Priscilla think about being used as an emergency shuttle service for a coffee-stained medical professional?” she asks.

“She is honored.”

“She told you that?”

“Yes.”