Page 72 of Her Player

That was the thing that moved through me as his hands worked their way across my shoulder blades. Not surprise. Not the sudden ambush of grief I’d been bracing for without knowing I was bracing. He had done this before. He knew the way I carried tension in my upper back, the particular knot that lived just left of my spine, the way my shoulders didn’t come down all the way unless someone made them. He knew because he had learned me, the same way he learned everything, quietly, without asking permission, without announcing that he was paying attention.

He was always paying attention.

I thought about Ryan. I let myself, because it was his day and because I had learned that trying not to think about him only made the thoughts come harder. I thought about Ryan and I thought about the fact that I had loved him for twenty-two years, that he had been the first person who made me feel like the sharpest version of myself instead of just the most manageable one, and that somewhere in the years since I lost him I had convinced myself that was it. That was the one. That I had already had the thing most people never got at all, and asking for more was the kind of greed the universe didn’t forgive.

Rhett’s thumbs pressed into the base of my skull, slow and certain.

I hadn’t let anyone take care of me on this day. Not once in fourteen years. Not Brynn, who always tried, who left flowers outside my door and sent texts and once, the year she was seventeen, sat outside my bedroom all night because she didn’t know what else to do. I loved her for it. I kept her out anyway. This grief was mine. Private. A room in my chest with the door locked from the inside.

Rhett had not asked me to unlock it.

He had simply waited until I ran out of reasons not to open it myself.

The tears, when they came, came differently than they had in the locker room. Not one, not quiet. My eyes just filled and I let them, leaning the side of my face against the tile and feeling the hot water and his hands and the whole impossible weight of the day sitting somewhere above my sternum where I’d been keeping it since I woke up on the anniversary morning and remembered, the way I always remembered.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t ask if I was all right. He already knew the answer. He just kept moving his hands in those slow circles until my shoulders finally came down from wherever they’d been holding themselves, and then he pulled me gently back against his chest and held me in the steam and the heat and let me cry without making me explain it.

Ryan would have known what to do with this man.

He would have recognized him immediately, the way he always recognized people who were worth keeping. And he would have looked at me with that expression he got sometimes, the one that meant I told you so without him ever having told me anything at all, and then he would have been completely insufferable about it.

I let that thought land.

I let it stay.

I let him wash me. All of me. I lifted my arms when he asked. I turned when he needed me to. I let him tip my head back under the water and work the shampoo through my hair with both hands, his fingertips moving in slow circles against my scalp until I made a sound I didn’t plan on making.

He didn’t comment on it.

He just kept going.

It wasn’t until he went in for the second pass that I finally found my voice.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

His hands paused. “For what?”

I moved my hand vaguely through the air. “This. All of it. Yesterday. Today.”

“Don’t.”

“Rhett—”

“I said don’t.” He tipped my head back under the water, rinsing the conditioner through with his fingers. “You don’t apologize for hurting. Not in here. Not with me.”

I stared up at the ceiling through the steam and the water and didn’t say anything else.

He switched out the blade on the straight razor before he touched me. I noticed that. The care of it. He wasn’t rushing. He wasn’t performing patience either. He was just present in the specific, deliberate way he was always present, like he’d made his decision about where he was going to be a long time ago and simply hadn’t left.

“Nice deep breaths,” he murmured when I tensed.

“Sorry.”

“No apologies.” His thumb moved in a slow circle. “Just breathe.”

I breathed.

By the time he was done I felt like a different person than the one who had sat in that corner chair staring at an empty bookcase. Not fixed. Not okay in any complete sense of the word. But present. Back inside my own body. Back inside my own life.