House Calls

You fall asleep with the phone on your chest and his last message still on the screen.

In the morning, the conversation feels like something that happened to someone else. Then you walk into the hallway with your coffee and find a bag of ice on your doormat, sealed, sweating, with a sticky note in blocky handwriting.

for you. since your freezer only has one sad popsicle.

You never told him about the popsicle.

The walls really are paper.

He comes over at eleven that night, after a team dinner. Two knocks on your door, not three. You'll learn the difference later.

When you open it, he's leaning on the frame in a black hoodie, hood up, like a celebrity trying not to be recognized in his own hallway. It doesn't work. Nothing about him is built for hiding. Even with the hood shadowing half his face, the line of his jaw and that mouth would stop traffic.

"You look like you're casing the place," you tell him.

"I'm being discreet."

"You're wearing a hoodie with your own number on the sleeve."

He glances down at the 44 stitched on the cuff. "Huh."

You step back and he walks in, and suddenly your apartment is very small. He looks around at the half-unpacked boxes, the plant you've already almost killed, the strings of lights you hung crooked over the window because it made the place feel like yours.

"It's very..." He searches for the word.

"If you say small, I'm stabbing you with a dry needle."

"Cozy," he says. "I was going to say cozy."

"Shirt off. Couch. Lie on your right side."

"Wow. Dinner first, Doc."

"Rhys."

He grins, and it's the real one this time, not the press-conference one. Lopsided. It makes him look younger and about ten times more dangerous. Then he pulls the hoodie and T-shirt off together, right arm first, and lies down on your couch like it was made for him.

It wasn't. His feet hang off the end.

You kneel beside the couch with your hands warm and your lotion on the coffee table and your professional face firmly on. You've done this a thousand times. Soft tissue release. Trigger points. You know where every muscle in the shoulder girdle starts and ends.

You've just never done it on a man who looks like a marble statue somebody fell in love with and then set on your couch.

Focus.

You press your thumb into the back of his shoulder, along the edge of the blade. The muscle there is a knot the size of a walnut. He makes a sound into your throw pillow that's half groan, half curse.

"Breathe," you say.

"I'm breathing."

"You're holding your breath like you're underwater. Breathe out."

He does. The knot gives, a little.

"Where'd you learn this?" he mumbles.

"Physio school. Six years of anatomy. And one summer with a rugby team in Millbrook that made me want to die."

"Rugby guys are soft."

"They said the same thing about hockey players."

"Liars." He shifts. "Why Kingsport?"

"Because it was the job I wanted and they actually called me back." You work along the muscle. "Why do you live in a building with no elevator when you make more money than God?"

"Elevator works."

"It has a sign that says nope."

"It works for me. I kick it." He's quiet for a second. "I like it here. Nobody bothers me. Mrs. Abernathy on two brings me soup when we lose. The guy in 3C plays cello at seven in the morning and it's terrible, and I find that comforting."

You laugh. You can't help it.

He turns his head on the pillow and looks up at you, and the laugh dies somewhere in your chest. His eyes are so pale this close. Ice over deep water.

"What," you say.

"Nothing. You laugh like you're surprised you're doing it."

You press harder into the knot than you strictly need to.

"Ow."

"Breathe out."

You work on him for forty minutes. Soft tissue, then gentle range of motion, then ice. You write it all down in a notebook you keep separate from the team system, because you said you'd decide what to report and you meant it. Dates. Measurements. How far the arm goes before it stops.

Sixty-five degrees tonight. Five better than three days ago.

"That's progress," you tell him.

"That's pathetic."

"That's a beginning."

He's sitting up, pulling his shirt back on, when your door opens without a knock.

"I brought wine and I'm not taking no for an..." Dani stops dead in the doorway with a bottle in each hand and her scrub top still on under her coat. Her eyes go from you, kneeling by the couch with lotion on your hands, to the very large, very shirtless man halfway into a T-shirt.

Nobody moves.

"Hi," Rhys says.

"Hi," Dani says faintly.

"This is professional," you say.

"Clearly." Dani's eyebrows climb into her hairline. "Super professional. Very medical. You're..." She actually points with the wine bottle. "You're him."

"Depends who you mean."

"You're on the side of the bus that goes past my hospital. The underwear one."

You turn to look at him. "The what?"

Rhys pulls the shirt the rest of the way down with enormous dignity. "It was for charity."

"It was not for charity," Dani says. "I looked it up. It was for a cologne."

"Some of the money went to charity."

Dani sets both bottles down on your counter very carefully, like they might go off. "Ava. Can I talk to you in the kitchen?"

"We're basically in the kitchen."

"Then can I talk to you with my eyes."

Rhys picks up his hoodie and gives you both a two-finger salute. "Ladies. Thanks for the house call, Doc." At the door he stops and looks back at Dani. "She's a good physio. That's all this is."

"Uh huh," Dani says.

The door closes. You hear his key in 4B. Then, through the wall, very faintly, him laughing.

Dani turns on you. "You are treating the hottest man in North America on your couch in secret and you didn't tell me?"

"It's complicated."

"Is it complicated, or is it complicated?"

"It's a shoulder, Dani."

She looks at your face for a long time. You've known her since you were nineteen. You've never been able to lie to her.

"Oh, honey," she says softly. "You're in so much trouble."

At morning skate the next day, you're taping Bash's wrist by the bench when a woman you don't know comes down the tunnel with a press badge on a lanyard.

She's striking. Glossy dark hair, a tailored white coat, red lipstick on a rink morning, which takes nerve. Every guy on the bench sits up straighter when she passes.

"You're the new physio," she says, holding out a hand with perfect nails. "Sloane Devereux. Kingsport Ledger. I cover the team."

"Nice to meet you."

"Settling in? Must be a lot. New city, new players." She smiles, warm as a fireplace. "How's the captain's left shoulder holding up, Ava?"

Your hands stop on Bash's tape.

You haven't said a word about Rhys's shoulder to anyone. Not to Bettina. Not to the team system.

Nobody has said left.