From Rags to Riches: The Discarded Wife's Revenge

What Javi Knows

Sienna

Javier Reyes came into the clinic on a Tuesday afternoon with a hamstring problem and absolutely no intention of staying quiet about it.

"Before you say anything," he announced, dropping onto the treatment table with the energy of someone who had never once been asked to lower his voice and taken it seriously, "I've already done the stretches."

"You haven't." I replied flatly clearly not entertained.

"Ok...I've thought about doing the stretches. That has to count for something."

I took a good look at him. He was bigger than he looked on camera, I mean most of them were. I checked the notes from his last visit, found the flag Dr. Okafor had left about the left hamstring, and pulled on a pair of gloves.

"Lie flat and straighten out your left leg straight."

He complied almost immediately. "You know, the last therapist used to ease into it. Make conversation first, even try to ask about the game."

"How did that hamstring work out?"

He opened his mouth and closed it. "Fair."

I worked through the assessment methodically. The tightness was higher than the notes suggested, which meant he'd been playing through it for longer than he'd reported. I pressed into the belly of the muscle and he made a sound that was not quite dignified.

"You've been compensating," I said.

"I wouldn't call it that, it's more like competing." He shrugged on the bed.

"Not to your hamstring." I shot back.

He propped himself up on his elbows against every instruction I'd given him thirty seconds ago. "Okay, I have a question."

"Lie flat."

"It's a quick one."

"Mr. Reyes!"

"Javi." He corrected it automatically. "Only my mother calls me Mr. Reyes and only when I've done something catastrophic." He paused. "How are you finding it? I mean working here?"

I kept my hands moving. "It's a good clinic."

"That's not what I asked."

I pressed into a knot above his knee and he winced sharply enough that it resolved the conversation for a few seconds.

"The staff is good," I said when the silence had stretched long enough. "Dr. Okafor runs a clean program."

"And the rest of it?"

"What rest of it?"

He looked at the ceiling. "Come on. You're treating players on a team whose captain is in the middle of a media circus that you are now part of. That has to be a specific kind of strange."

"It's manageable."

"Manageable?" He repeated it like he was tasting it. "Dominic said the same thing about the Vanessa situation for the first two weeks. Right up until he nearly took someone's head off at practice."

I forced myself not to comment. "Different circumstances."

"Sure." He was quiet for a moment, which based on everything I'd observed in the last ten days was not his natural state.

"He doesn't talk about people."

I glanced up. He was still studying the ceiling, which told me this was deliberate. He wanted to say this without making it a confrontation.

"Most people in his position talk about everyone," he continued. "Agents, coaches, exes, teammates. It's just what happens when your whole life is managed by committee. You start narrating it constantly. Dom doesn't. He watches. He reads a situation and files everything away and then three weeks later he says one sentence that tells you he understood all of it the whole time."

I repositioned his leg and started working deeper into the tissue. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because you treated his shoulder four days in a row and didn't mention it to anyone in the building. Not the other staff. Not even Dr. Okafor. You just treated it, documented it and moved on." He finally looked at me. "He noticed that."

"I'm not in the business of discussing patients."

"I know. That's the point." He settled back. "There was this one season, two years ago, we were down three games in a series and the media had basically already written our obituary. Every analyst, every talking head, everyone who'd spent the previous season calling him the best player alive was suddenly listing his flaws like a grocery receipt. And Dom showed up to practice each morning and did his job. No speeches, no deflection, no visible reaction. He just f*****g showed up."

"Sounds more like discipline."

"It's not discipline." He said it without any heat, just certainty. "Discipline is when it costs you something and you do it anyway. What Dom does is different. It's more like he's decided that certain things don't get to reach him. The problem is when you spend long enough deciding what doesn't get to reach you, you forget to decide what does."

I pressed into the upper hamstring and he breathed through it rather than making noise this time.

"He sent groceries," I said, and immediately wanted to take it back. f**k I hadn't planned on saying that

Javi's face moved before his words caught up. A flicker of something genuine that he didn't bother hiding.

"He told you?"

"There was no note. I worked it out." I shrugged.

"Hot sauce?"

"Right on top."

"Do you know he spent forty-five minutes on that order?" He said in between laughs. "I know because he called me in the middle of it to ask whether people in Brooklyn preferred rice or pasta and I told him that was the most unhinged question anyone had ever asked me."

I didn't say anything. I kept working because it was easier than figuring out what my face was doing.

"He's not good at this," he continued. "At any of it. The public stuff, yeah, he's been trained for that since he was nineteen. But the other thing," He gestured vaguely at the space between us. "He spent eight months treating the Vanessa situation like a logistics problem. Never once talked about it as something that happened to him personally. That it hurt. That it changed how he moved through rooms."

"Did it?" I whisper"Change how he moves through rooms?"

He sighed. "He trusts fewer people now. And the ones he does trust, he watches differently like he's trying to catch them being real before they have a chance to be anything else."

I moved to a different section of the muscle and we were quiet for a stretch.

"Why are you telling me all of this?" I asked again, meaning it differently this time.

He didn't answer immediately. He looked at the wall across from him, at the anatomy diagram mounted above the supply shelf, like he was choosing his words from somewhere more careful than his usual register.

"Because he doesn't have a lot of people who tell him things straight," he said finally. "Everyone in his life wants something from him or is protecting something around him. And you walked into a room knowing exactly who he was and treated him like a body with a problem anyway." He turned to look at me again. "That's rarer than it sounds. And I'd rather you know what you're in the middle of than figure it out too late."

The session ran another twenty minutes and he filled most of it with team stories that were funny enough that I stopped being consious about whether I was smiling. He was impossible not to respond to, which I suspected was less a personality trait and more a deliberate skill he'd honed over a long career of being the one person in any room willing to say the actual thing out loud.

When I finished and he sat up properly this time, he reached for his jacket.

"Same time next week?"

"Check with Dr. Okafor."

"Alright." He stood and rolled his shoulder out of habit, an old injury by the look of the compensation pattern. "For what it's worth," he said on his way to the door, "I didn't believe a word of that article."

"I know. He told me."

"Right." He stopped in the doorway, jacket half on. "He told you what I said."

"Is there a problem?"

"Oh no, it's nothing." he chuckled before leaving.

I stood in the empty clinic and stripped off the gloves and dropped them in the bin by the door.

Dominic had spent eight months being managed and handled and positioned and none of it had worked because none of it had been real.

Yet somehow the realest thing in his life right now was a contract with an expiration date and I was starting to feel the exact same way I felt when I first saw Marcus.