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I sigh and offer a half smile. “So there’s my big, sad story.”
“Don’t give up searching for the things you’re passionate about, okay? You’ll find them, lots of things. It just takes time. It takes little daily steps.”
“Thanks to you, I’ll be taking more daily steps than I probably ever have, while you’re here.”
“And beyond! I’m telling you, once you start to loosen up that joint, you’re going to want to keep up with it. You can do it, Alec.”
There’s a commotion at the door as a couple with three teens enters the gym.
Oakley eyes me, and it seems she’s thinking of a hundred things at once. She stands. “I better go. But how do you feel about two-a-days?” There it is. The sauciness has returned. Complete with her arms crossed over her chest and her brows in the air.
“I’ve had my fair share.” I shudder at the memories of that special brand of fire and brimstone.
Her lips go thin before widening back into a smile. “Oh, really? Well then, think you can show me what you’re made of?”
Two-a-days. A memory of high school football right as summer ends floods me. Sometimes thinking about football at the high school level doesn’t hurt quite as much as when I remember my college and professional playing days.
“Can a monkey handle a few pounds of bananas?” This is dangerous territory, this attempt at flirting, and I can hardly even believe myself.
She laughs, and it sounds like the wind chimes hanging above my aunt Stella’s porch. “Okay, then. Let’s maximize my time here. Let’s do two one-hour sessions the next three days. I’ll get your knee in the best possible shape it can be.” She closes the gap and I fixate on her mouth and teeth and the shiny gloss on her lips. “Mark my words,” she promises.
This is going to hurt, and I don’t mean just my knee.
The next morning, we meet up for Oakley’s two-a-days regimen. It’s like the old me has taken a brief hiatus and some new version of me, the one who suddenly doesn’t hate life as much, is setting up residency and barbecuing in my backyard.
It’s all good, though. She’s leaving soon. And although these exercises are helping me feel less like the dead fish I’ve been since August, I know I’m still too much of a broken mess for any woman.
I’m starting to see another side to Oakley. She’s a brutal trainer, using her physical therapy experience to give me exercises that have me, albeit sore, feeling stronger and more stable on my knee than I have since my injury. It’s surprising how quickly I’ve started feeling better.
Maybe I won’t get to take her out to dinner.
“It’s harder than it looks,” Oakley says to me in the gym after I take longer to get started than I probably should.
“It’s lifting my leg two inches off the ground and then lowering it,” I say. “I think you have no confidence in my strength.”
Her gaze goes over my entire body. It’s quick, but I know what I saw. “I have no doubt about your strength, Alec. That’s not the issue. Brute strength is one thing, control is quite another and this is only going to help you. So, chop chop.”
Her voice is commanding, her tone bossy. I’m reminded again of the physical therapists and trainers for the Wolves, the way they pushed all of us injured players.
I grow cynical, my chest hardening. It wasn’t like they were bad at their jobs or anything like that. And I did everything they asked me to. I knew it was do or die, and I laid it all out there. I did all the therapies, exercises, and accommodations. Everything. And look where it got me? A bored, former pro athlete living in a little cabin in the shadow of my brother’s resort empire, completely unsure about what I’m going to do for the next sixty or so years of life.
Oakley’s found a couple of foam wedges and a roller, so after I finish her little exercise which was way harder than I gave it credit for, she’s setting me up in position for a new one. We have the gym to ourselves today, so it feels like a rare little gift—a stolen moment. I lean back against the foam wedges, feeling comfortable.
She’s so close to me, I can see the flecks of hazel in her green eyes.
“We’re going to roll this out,” she says. “It’s okay to cry.”
I grunt a laugh, but her closeness to me, her clean cherry scent, the way the muscles of her arms flex and retreat with every roll is no laughing matter.
The way my knee feels is also no laughing matter because it hurts so bad my eyes sting and start to water. I’m not crying in the classic sense, but the pain is so white hot, it’s as if it’s seeping out of every pore, every tear duct.
She looks surprised. “Breathe, Alec, breathe.” I stop fighting her and her requests. Before, with the trainers who tried to save my leg, I was angry. Even though I was cooperative out of sheer desperation, I begrudged every exercise, everything they asked me to do. I hated it with a vigor I’d never known before.
Right now? Something in her eyes is telling me it’s okay to let go and trust. And even though the rolling hurts like nothing else, somehow her breathing and her deadlock gaze help me through it.
It’s over right before I want to quit, and she draws back and sets the foam roller off to the side. “Yeah, get rid of that nasty spawn of the devil,” I say, eyeing the roller with disgust.
She laughs. “That’s a good name for it. I’m going to have to remember that with my patients.” She lowers herself beside me on the weight bench. There’s a sadness behind her eyes. “Whenever I have patients again. That’s up in the air.”
