His hand dropped.
We walked the rest of the way to the training room in silence, and the door shut behind us, and the corridor noise disappeared, and it was just the two of us in the particular quiet of a room where things had been said before, where things were about to be said again.
I still hadn't caught my breath.
I told myself it was the fall.
11
The training room smelled like antiseptic and athletic tape.
I sat on the table because Cross pointed at it. I didn't have the energy to argue, which was its own kind of alarming.
My helmet was still on. I didn't take it off. Some part of me had decided that the helmet was a boundary, that as long as I was still in full gear I was still technically a hockey player in a medical room and not something smaller, something that had just been walked off the ice in front of reporters while the whole team watched.
Cross set his tablet on the counter. Washed his hands. Dried them with the deliberate, unhurried movements of someone who was not rattled, who was never rattled, who had apparently been assembled in a factory that didn't manufacture rattled.
He came to stand in front of me and reached for my helmet without asking.
"I can do it," I said.
He unclipped the chin strap anyway. Lifted it off. Set it beside me. His expression was the usual, nothing, just this focused professional attention, the same face he brought to everything,and I had a brief and unwelcome memory of it being a slightly different face at the boards with Jenkins twenty minutes ago.
"Look straight ahead," he said.
I looked straight ahead.
He went through the assessment. I'd been through this enough times in the last forty-eight hours that I could have run it myself, lights and questions and balance, the same machinery, and I answered everything correctly because the answers were always the easy part.
The hard part was sitting still while he did it, being this close to Cross in a quiet room without the noise of the rink and the crowd and twenty-three other people to diffuse whatever the problem was.
He wasn't filling the silence. He never filled the silence.
"Jenkins looked fine," I said.
Cross didn't answer.
"Knee thing. He always favors his left edge when he's cold, someone should tell him to—"
"I'm aware."
"Right." I looked at the penlight when he moved it. "Obviously. You're the doc."
He stepped closer, the balance check. I fixed my gaze on a point on the wall behind his shoulder and breathed and told myself what I always told myself, which was that this was medical, this was his job, there was nothing happening here that required my attention beyond answering questions correctly.
He smelled like clean soap.
Cross held my chin to angle my head, and I had a system for this, I had a whole established system for the proximity and the grip and his attention, which was to focus on a fixed point and wait for it to be over.
The system had been built before I knew what Nathan Cross looked like lifting weights in his own home, before I knew hisheartbeat wasn't steady, before I'd spent a significant portion of time lying in his bed thinking about clean soap and the back of his neck and what was wrong with me, which was apparently quite a lot, which I was going to deal with at some unspecified future date when I had the resources.
Currently I did not have the resources.
Currently Cross's thumb was on my jaw.
The system worked fine until his thumb moved.
Not dramatically. Not like a signal. Just a small shift, the pad of his thumb tracing a short slow line along my jaw where his fingers were already resting, and it was probably an adjustment, probably a repositioning, except that he didn't reposition after.
