Page 37 of Colliding with Ten

Hill looked up from his clipboard and raised an eyebrow. “Let me guess. You’re bored.”

“I’m losing my mind.”

He chuckled and motioned for me to sit on the cushioned table. “Okay. Let’s talk.”

He palpated my knee, checking the swelling and my range of motion. “You’re about three weeks out, right?”

I nodded.

“Not a bad recovery so far.”

I exhaled. “Finally.”

“But,” he held up a finger, “no pivoting or twisting. No jumps or lateral movements. You can’t load the knee yet.”

“What can I do?”

He smiled, then ran down a list of appropriate exercises that wouldn’t aggravate my knee. I committed them to memory.

“Brace stays on when you’re up,” he added. “Ice two to three times a day. Elevate above the heart. If swelling increases, you’re doing too much.”

I frowned. “So I have to wait.”

“Correct. But if you respect this now, you’ll be back stronger. If you rush it, you’ll be dealing with this all season.”

I nodded. “Okay,” I said, pouting.

He chuckled at my expression. “Just trust the process.”

A week later, I was behaving. I did glute bridges and core work. I iced and elevated like a champion and wore the brace without arguing, which, in my opinion, deserved a medal.

Then my mind grew as restless as my body. Curiosity wasn’t rule-breaking. I told myself it was research as I lay on the couch with my laptop. AJ was out with Meadow. I was alone.

I typed, MCL ACL recovery speed up, and looked around the newly rose-free apartment like someone was going to catch me watching porn. The internet offered cryotherapy, compression sleeves with dubious “trust me, bro” testimonials, and shockwave therapy videos that looked medieval.

Halfway down the page, I clicked on: Dance-Based Rehabilitation for Lower Extremity Injuries. My heart rate ticked up. A dancer stood barefoot in a studio, knee wrapped with impeccable posture. She guided viewers through subtle weight shifts and careful articulation through the foot.

“This isn’t about pushing through pain. It’s about reintroducing trust.”

Trust. I swallowed dry. That word was verbalizing my fear since the injury. I questioned whether I could jump and turn with the same power. Would my body catch me the way it used to?

I clicked on another video. Dancers demonstrated rehabilitative phases. Journal articles explained that dancers regained balance faster because we moved so much. Controlled choreography could rebuild stability without overloading ligaments. My foot flexed under the blanket as a woman demonstrated a slow développé with a chair for support. Another dancer used choreography as rehab, performing movements at twenty percent. This was inspiring.

Somewhere between reading clinical studies and watching a dancer explain neuromuscular re-patterning, I got distracted. Instead of typing dance rehabilitation knee ligament, I typed, Lennox Monroe.

“Oh my God,” I muttered in the dark, my fingers tearing at my roots. “Why?”

The internet exploded with magazine spreads, football clips, highlight reels, and fan-made montages set to hip-hop.

I clicked one, then another, and down the rabbit hole I went. In one video, he was mic’d up, teasing his teammates on the sidelines. He was funnier than I expected. There were so many interviews, you’d think he was a Hollywood celebrity. Action shots from the field looked like editorial spreads. The camera loved him.

I swallowed as the algorithm took a turn. The feed was flooded with rumors about the women in his life. Pictures of exes from college and dates to events popped up. One of his exes had dated a rival quarterback before she dated Lennox. That story had several major headlines, hinting at a big kerfuffle between the two guys.

The current rumored girlfriend was a model, Shay Sanders. Of course she was. My heart somersaulted. She was a leggy brunette with soulful eyes and a curvy body chiseled by the gods. I stared at her photos. They would make tall, gorgeous, blue-eyed babies. Way cuter than ours would be. Wait. What?

What was I doing? I glanced at the brace on my knee, pictured my messy bun, and sighed, deflated. My life was in transition. I hadn’t even finished college yet. There was no universe where Lennox Monroe would see me and think, her. She’s my future.

He was a franchise quarterback with women waiting for him to remember they existed. We worked for competing teams. That detail felt important. These organizations had policies against fraternizing with players, opposing or otherwise. Even if there wasn’t a rule, there was AJ.