COLD HANDS
1563 Words
Declan came into the treatment room at six thirty the next morning with a shoulder he insisted was “nothing.”
That was how athletes described anything that hurt enough to scare them.
Franssen had already gone upstairs for the staff meeting, leaving me to finish intake on two players before my first lecture. The training center was barely awake. One equipment cart squeaked somewhere in the corridor. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead. The room smelled like disinfectant, menthol gel, and coffee that had been sitting too long on a warmer. Through the window, the parking lot lights were still on, pale halos in the pre-dawn dark, the kind of hour that belonged to people who couldn’t sleep for reasons they weren’t ready to name.
Declan stood in the doorway in a black training shirt and shorts.
“You’re early,” I said.
“So are you.”
“I work here.”
“So do I.”
“You get paid.”
“So should you.”
I stared at him.
“Is there a reason you’re here?”
“My shoulder.”
“The one that’s nothing?”
His mouth moved at one corner.
“Apparently nothing woke me up twice.”
That erased the last of my irritation.
“Franssen won’t be back down until after the staff meeting.”
“Already heard.”
“You could wait.”
“I could.”
He stayed in the doorway. I set my tablet down.
“Then why are you here?”
His answer took just long enough to matter.
“I wanted you to look at it.”
The room seemed to narrow around the sentence. I folded my arms. “Because Mason asked you to keep an eye on me?”
“No.”
“Because you think letting the student practice on you counts as charity?”
His expression changed immediately.
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Make yourself smaller because you’re angry at me.” He stepped into the room. “I’ve watched you work. You caught Petrov’s instability before he admitted the ankle was worse. You argued with Franssen about Hale’s return-to-play test and you were right. I came because you’re good.”
For a second, I forgot how irritated I was.
Then I remembered that praise from Declan was dangerous precisely because I wanted it.
“If I think you need Franssen, I’m getting Franssen.”
“Fine.”
“If I think you shouldn’t train, you don’t train.”
His eyebrows lifted.
“That sounded like an order.”
“It was.”
Something almost like approval moved through his face.
“Which side?” I asked.
“Right.”
“Take off the shirt.”
The words left my mouth before I had time to hear them. Declan’s eyes lifted to mine. For one second, neither of us moved.
Then he grabbed the hem and pulled the shirt over his head.
Under the fluorescent lights there was nowhere for my attention to hide. His shoulders were wider than they had been the last summer I let myself look for too long, his skin marked by the ordinary evidence of hockey—an old pale line near one rib, a fading bruise high on his side, muscle built for impact rather than display. None of it should have mattered. I knew anatomy. I knew exactly how to separate a body from the person inside it. Apparently that skill had limits.
I turned toward the treatment table and pretended I needed to adjust the paper. Ridiculous.
I had treated half-naked athletes for two years. Shoulders were shoulders. Backs were backs. Skin was anatomy.
Except Declan’s body came with almost a decade of memory attached to it.
The boy who had slept on Nana’s couch after his father showed up drunk.
The teenager who taught me how to throw a proper punch and then made me promise never to use it.
The man who had spent six months acting like looking at me too long was dangerous.
“Sit.”
He sat. I moved behind him.
“Tell me where.”
He reached across with his left hand and touched the back of his right shoulder.
“Here. Mostly after contact yesterday.”
“Any numbness?”
“No.”
“Tingling?”
“No.”
“Loss of strength?”
“No.”
“Pain from one to ten.”
“Two.”
I pressed my thumb into the tight muscle below his shoulder. His breath cut off.
“Four,” he corrected.
“Thought so.”
“Your hands are freezing.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“By everyone.”
“Then stop acting surprised.”
I guided his arm through the movements I needed and watched how the shoulder responded. He was tight near the top of the range, but nothing suggested a serious injury.
“You’re not broken,” I said.
“High praise.”
“You’re irritated and stubborn.”
“That sounds more accurate.”
“I want the final load test before you take full contact.”
His head turned slightly. “Today?”
“If the movement improves.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“You sit out.”
He looked over his shoulder at me. Not offended. Not amused. Assessing. Then he faced forward again.
“Okay.”
The easy acceptance did something strange to my chest. Mason argued with me when I told him to ice his knee. Half the roster tried to negotiate pain scales like contract terms. Declan, who could command a locker room without raising his voice, had just handed me the decision without making me prove I deserved it. I should have relaxed. I didn’t.
Because every time I touched him, he got quieter. Not tense. Quiet. There was a difference. Tension fought the contact. This felt like containment.
I moved to the tight band below the shoulder blade.
“This?”
His answer came half a second late.
“Yeah.”
I worked along the edge of the muscle with my thumbs until I found the worst spot and leaned in with the heel of my hand—small circles, controlled pressure, the kind of contact I had used hundreds of times on other bodies and that felt completely different on this one. The muscle resisted first. Then gave, little by little.
And because I was standing close to his back, because there was no physical way not to notice, I felt his breathing change. Slower. Deeper. Deliberate.
As if controlling each inhale was the only thing keeping him still on that table instead of doing something else. Goosebumps rose under my hands. It wasn’t cold.
My whole body had gone hyperaware in a way four hundred repetitions on other patients had never prepared me for, every nerve ending suddenly reporting for duty at once, useless information about a body I had no clinical reason to be cataloging this closely. The knot finally released beneath my palm. That was it. Treatment over. I knew it. I didn’t move.
I left my hands where they were, flat against his back, feeling heat push into my cold palms. Three seconds. I counted them. Then hated myself for counting. Neither of us moved.
The room was so quiet I could hear my pulse inside my wrists. Declan lifted one hand and caught mine. Not to remove it.
His fingers closed around my wrist, hot against the fine bone, his hand swallowing mine.
For one brief second, the pressure went in the opposite direction. He wasn’t pulling me away. He was holding me against him.
And the realization traveled through me with a heat that had nothing to do with treatment.
“Quinn.” He didn’t turn around. His voice was rough. “Don’t.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“Yeah.”
He released me slowly, finger by finger.
“That’s the problem.”
He stood in one movement, like staying another second would be dangerous, and grabbed his shirt from the bench.
By the time he faced me, the captain’s expression was back—smooth, controlled.
“This can’t happen again.”
“Nothing happened.”
“Quinn.” He stopped at the door with his back to me. “Mason trusts me. I’m not giving him a reason to regret it.” A pause. “Whatever this is, it can’t happen. Because of him.”
He left before I could answer. I stood alone in the treatment room with my hands still warm from his back and, for the first time in six months, let myself think the impossible. There was the crack in his sentence. An indifferent man didn’t say this can’t happen.
An indifferent man didn’t name something that had to be avoided.
He didn’t leave a room because you were in it. He simply didn’t notice you were there.
I had read those six months of distance—the coldness, the missed dinners, the careful way he moved around me without touching—as disinterest.
I had accepted it until I convinced myself I didn’t care.
Until I built a version of myself around that lie, a version that expected nothing from him. Now I had something worse than hope. I had evidence.
And I had to see him again at work.
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