Section 9.4
Tessa
The general manager of the Boston Harbormen read my contract out loud to me like I couldn’t be trusted to have read it myself.
“Section nine, paragraph four.” Warren Kessler tapped the page with a silver pen that probably cost more than my first car. “Staff shall not engage in any romantic or sexual relationship with a rostered player. Violation constitutes termination for cause, and the organization reserves the right to report the conduct to the appropriate licensing authority.” He looked up. “You understand what that last part means, Dr. Quinn.”
“It means you’d tell the Massachusetts Board of Allied Health that I slept with a patient.”
“It means we protect the athletes and we protect the brand.” He smiled the way men smile when they’ve already decided you’re going to be a problem. “Your predecessor understood that. Mostly.”
I’d heard about my predecessor. Everyone in Boston sports medicine had. He’d lasted four seasons, and then he’d lasted one long weekend in Cabo with a defenseman’s wife, and the Harbormen had needed a head physical therapist in the last week of February with the playoffs seven weeks out.
So here I was. Thirty-one years old, eight years licensed, a doctorate I was still paying for, and a signature on a contract that a lot of people would have killed for.
“I don’t date athletes, Mr. Kessler,” I said. “I don’t date patients. I don’t date anyone I’d have to see at seven in the morning with their shirt off and their range of motion in my notes. You can put the pen away.”
He didn’t put the pen away. He signed his part, slid my copy across the desk, and said, “Cole’s in your room at nine. Get him on the ice by April. That’s the job.”
The treatment room at the Garrison was on the lower level, down a concrete hallway that smelled like rubber matting, skate-blade steel and the industrial lemon cleaner they used on everything. Three padded tables. A wall of resistance bands sorted by color, which I resorted by tension within ten minutes because whoever had organized them thought green came before red. It did not. An ultrasound unit. A rack of foam rollers. Through a glass door, the hydrotherapy room: a hot tub, a cold plunge, and a stainless-steel whirlpool that hummed like an idling truck.
“You fixed the bands.”
The man in the doorway was maybe thirty-four, slim, brown-skinned, in a Harbormen polo with a lanyard and a stethoscope he definitely didn’t need tucked in his pocket like a talisman. He had a box of donuts under one arm.
“Raj Patel,” he said. “Associate PT. I’ve been here three years and I’ve never once put the bands back in order, and Dr. Halvorsen used to yell at me about it, and you’ve been here twelve minutes.”
“Tessa Quinn. Green comes after red.”
“Green comes after red,” he repeated solemnly, and set the donuts on the counter. “I’m going to like you. Everyone’s terrified of you, by the way. Kessler sent an email calling you a ‘culture reset.’ That’s never good.”
“I’m not here to reset anyone’s culture. I’m here to treat injuries.”
“Sure. That’s what Halvorsen said too, and then Cabo happened.” He took a cruller and pointed it at me. “You’ve got Cole first.”
“I’ve read the file.”
“The file doesn’t do him justice. He’s going to come in here and swear at you and try to bring you coffee and tell you he’s fine. He is not fine. He’s been hiding how bad it is from Coach for three weeks because Kessler’s been making noises about not re-signing him in July.” Raj lowered his voice. “Thirty years old, bad shoulder, fighter. You know how the league goes now. Nobody wants to pay an enforcer.”
“So he needs the playoffs.”
“He needs the playoffs like he needs air. And the team needs him. The rookies follow him around like ducklings. He’s the only reason Ruiz didn’t get eaten alive this year.” Raj licked sugar off his thumb. “Just don’t let the mouth fool you. He’s a sweetheart. A big, dumb, filthy-mouthed sweetheart.”
“I’m not interested in whether he’s a sweetheart. I’m interested in his labrum.”
Raj grinned at me like I’d said something funny. “Okay, Doc.”
He left me the donuts. I didn’t eat one. I set my laptop on the counter and pulled up the file.
Mason Cole. 30. Left defense. Captain. Six-four, two-thirty. Left acromioclavicular joint sprain, grade two, with partial-thickness labral fraying, sustained January 19 during an altercation. Altercation. That was a polite word. I’d watched the clip on the train in. The Philadelphia winger had gone after Boston’s twenty-one-year-old rookie, and Mason Cole had come off the bench like a freight train with a grudge, dropped his gloves at center ice and taken the guy apart in eleven seconds. Then he’d fallen wrong, all two hundred and thirty pounds of him landing on the point of his left shoulder on the ice.
Three hundred and twelve penalty minutes in his career with Boston. Twenty-two goals. Fifty-one assists. And a nickname in the local press that I refused to say even in my own head.
At eight fifty-two, the door banged open.
“Oh, thank Christ, you’re real.”
He filled the doorway. That was the first thing, and I want it on record that I noticed it the way I’d notice a load-bearing wall, as a structural fact. Broad through the chest. Thick through the neck. Hair the color of wet sand, too long, shoved back with one hand. A nose that had been broken at least twice and set by someone in a hurry. A scar through his left eyebrow. He was wearing a gray Harbormen hoodie with the sleeves cut off, joggers, and slides with socks, and he was holding two coffees.
“Raj said the new PT was some hotshot doctor from Philly who fixed the soccer guy’s knee, and I said, buddy, I don’t care if she’s a fucking wizard, I just need someone who’ll get me back before Game One.” He crossed the room and held out a coffee. “Oat milk latte. I asked around. Nobody knew what you drink, so I guessed. If you hate oat milk, I’ll go back. I’m not proud.”
“I drink black coffee.”
“Shit.” He looked genuinely wounded. “Okay. Tomorrow.”
“There’s no tomorrow, Mr. Cole. There’s a schedule.” I didn’t take the cup. “Hoodie off. Sit on table two.”
He grinned. It was a stupid, sunny, wide-open grin with a chipped canine in it, and it hit me somewhere under my sternum like a hand pressed flat. I made a note to ignore it.
“Yes, Doc.”
He set both coffees on the counter, very carefully, next to my laptop, as if they were a peace offering he’d let me reconsider later. Then he reached for the hem of his hoodie with his right hand and stopped.
There it was. The hitch. He couldn’t get his left arm over his head.
“Don’t,” I said, already moving. “Stop. Let me.”
“I got it.”
“You don’t got it. You’ve got a separated AC joint and a frayed labrum and you’re about to do something stupid to save face. Right arm out first.”
He went still. Then he did exactly what I said, which surprised me enough that I nearly fumbled the sleeve. I worked the hoodie off his right side, eased it over his head, and lowered it down his left arm with the joint supported in my palm. His skin was hot. Hockey players always ran hot. It was a fact of physiology and had nothing to do with anything.
Then he was shirtless on my table, and I was a professional, and I had seen roughly four thousand shirtless men in my career.
None of them had looked at me like that.
He was watching me the way I imagined he watched a puck on the boards, total focus, almost gentle. There was a bruise on his ribs the size of my hand, faded to yellow. A tattoo across the top of his right shoulder, a compass rose in black linework. Freckles. A lot of freckles, actually, scattered across his chest and shoulders, which was unfair. Men built like that shouldn’t get freckles. It made them look approachable.
“You’re staring at my bruise,” he said.
“I’m assessing your bruise.”
“It’s from Dima. Practice. He says it was an accident, but he’s Russian and he was smiling, so.”
“Arms at your sides. Look straight ahead.”
I started where I always start, with my eyes. Left shoulder sitting lower than the right, maybe a centimeter. A visible step at the end of the collarbone where the joint had pulled apart. Mild atrophy in the posterior deltoid already, two weeks of guarding. I stepped behind him.
“I’m going to touch you now,” I said. I say it to every patient. It’s protocol.
“Okay.” His voice came out lower than it had been.
I laid my fingers along his collarbone and walked them out to the joint. He sucked in air through his teeth when I pressed.
“Pain, zero to ten.”
“Six. Seven. A sexy six.”
“There’s no such thing.”
“There is now. You invented it.”
I pressed again, a little harder than strictly necessary. “Seven?”
“Fuck. Yeah. Seven. Okay. Respect.”
I tested his range. Flexion, abduction, external rotation, internal rotation, each one with his arm cradled in my hands, my body close behind his back because it had to be. He smelled like drugstore soap and cold air and, faintly, coffee. I could feel his breathing change when I took his arm past ninety degrees, the stutter in his ribs right before pain. I could feel how hard he was working not to show it.
“You can tell me when it hurts,” I said quietly. “That’s the whole point.”
“It hurts,” he said. “It hurts like a son of a bitch, Doc. Like someone parked a truck on it. Like I’m thirty and I’ve been punching people for a living since I was seventeen and my body’s finally sending me the bill.”
That was more honest than I’d expected. I wrote it down. Not the words. The fact of them.
I did the special tests. O’Brien’s. Cross-body adduction. Speed’s. He swore at every single one of them, creatively and without repeating himself, and somewhere around the fourth test I realized I was biting the inside of my cheek to keep from smiling.
“Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” I said, before I could stop myself.
“Every Sunday on FaceTime. She’s in Thunder Bay. She taught me most of these words. You should hear her when the Leafs lose.”
I stepped back around to face him. He was sweating a little at the hairline. Good. He’d let me see it.
“Here’s where we are,” I said. “Your AC joint is a grade two. That means the ligaments that hold your collarbone to your shoulder blade are stretched and partially torn. It will heal without surgery if you let it. Your labrum, the ring of cartilage that keeps the ball of your shoulder in its socket, is frayed but not detached. It will tolerate load if we build the muscles around it. If you rush this, if you fight, if you take a hit before that joint is stable, you’ll be in surgery in May and on a beach in December wondering what happened to your career.”
“And if I don’t rush it?”
“Then I can probably have you cleared for full contact in five weeks. Six to be safe.”
“Game One is in seven.”
“I know when Game One is.”
He looked at me for a long moment. The grin was gone. What was underneath it was steadier and more serious than I’d guessed. “Then tell me what to do,” he said. “Whatever it is. I’ll do it.”
“Everyone says that.”
“I’m not everyone.”
“Everyone says that too.”
“Okay, but I mean it in a way that’s annoying.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and his face was suddenly much closer to mine. “I’ll be here at six every morning. I’ll do every rep. I’ll ice when you say ice. I’ll sleep eight hours. I’ll eat the fucking kale. I won’t fight. I won’t even look at a guy funny. You say jump, I’ll say how high, Doc, and then I’ll ask if you want it with or without the shoulder, because without would probably be smarter.”
“You’d be a model patient.”
“I’d be your favorite patient.”
“I don’t have favorites.”
“You will.”
And there it was again, that grin, slower this time, with something under it that made the room feel smaller. I had seen athletes flirt. I had seen them do it as a reflex, as a tactic, as a way to make a woman with authority over their body feel like she was the one being handled. This wasn’t that. Or it was, and he was better at it than anyone I’d ever met.
I picked up a sling from the counter. “Wear this between sessions. Not during sleep. Not during rehab. Ice twenty minutes on, forty off, three times today. You don’t lift anything heavier than that coffee with your left hand.”
“Can I lift you?”
“Mr. Cole.”
“Sorry. Sorry.” He held up his good hand. He did not look sorry. “That was out of line. I’m nervous. When I’m nervous I say dumb shit. Ask anyone.”
“I’m aware of the clause in my contract,” I said, and my voice came out exactly as cold as I wanted it to. “I assume you’re aware of it too. I’m here to fix your shoulder. I’m not here to be your entertainment while I do it.”
Something changed in his face. The playfulness went out of it like a light switching off, and I braced myself for the sulk, or the anger, or the shrug that meant he’d find someone easier to charm.
Instead he nodded once.
“Heard,” he said. “You’re right. I’m sorry, Dr. Quinn.”
Dr. Quinn. Not Doc. It shouldn’t have mattered. It landed anyway.
I helped him into the sling. I adjusted the strap at his neck, and my knuckles brushed the skin under his jaw, rough with a day’s stubble, and he held so still it felt deliberate. Like he’d decided that if I was going to touch him, he wasn’t going to waste it by moving.
“Six a.m.,” I said. “Not six-oh-five.”
“Not six-oh-five,” he agreed.
He got up. He took his hoodie, and he took his coffee, and he left the oat milk latte sitting next to my laptop.
At the door, he stopped.
“Can I say one thing? Not a dumb thing. A real thing.”
I didn’t answer. He took that as a yes, which I was beginning to suspect was how he took most things.
“You didn’t lie to me,” he said. “About the shoulder. Everybody else has been telling me it’s fine, it’s a tweak, I’ll be good to go, because they need me to be good to go. You told me I’m about one bad hit from being done.” He tapped the doorframe twice with his right knuckles. “So I’m gonna earn it. The clearance. I’m gonna earn every fucking day of it.”
“Good.”
“And then,” he said, very politely, “I’m gonna earn you.”
The door swung shut behind him before I could think of a single thing to say.
I stood in my new treatment room with my hands still warm from his shoulder and a contract in my bag that said I could lose everything, and I looked at the latte he’d left me.
Then I picked it up, because it would have been wasteful not to, and I drank it, and it was disgusting.
I drank the whole thing.
Yes, Doc
Mason
I was in the parking garage at five-forty the next morning with a large black coffee in my right hand and absolutely no plan beyond don’t be a jerk.
Sal was on the security desk, the way he’d been on the security desk since before I got traded here, with his reading glasses on his head and his Sudoku book open to a page he’d been losing to since Christmas.
“Cole.” He squinted at the clock. “You lost?”
“Rehab, Sal. New doc. Six a.m. sharp or she’ll have my nuts in a jar.”
“The redhead?”
“She’s not a redhead.” She was, sort of. Dark red, nearly brown, pulled back so tight it looked like it hurt, with one piece at the front that kept escaping. I’d watched it escape four times yesterday. I’d thought about it more than I’d thought about my shoulder. “How’s Maria’s tryout?”
His whole face changed. “Made varsity. Freshman. Starting center.”
“No shit.” I held up my coffee hand for a fist bump and he gave me one, grinning. “Tell her I said to keep her head up in the corners.”
“She says you’re old.”
“She’s right. Tell her anyway.”
The hallway to the treatment room was dark except for the strip of light under her door. Five-forty-four. She was already in there.
Of course she was.
I knocked with my elbow and pushed in. She was standing at the counter in a navy quarter-zip with the team crest on it, typing, and she didn’t look up.
“You’re early.”
“You said not six-oh-five. You didn’t say anything about five-forty-five.” I set the coffee next to her laptop. “Black. Large. From the Greek place on Causeway, not the chain, because Raj said you’d know the difference and you’d judge me.”
Now she looked up. She had gray eyes. Not blue. Gray, like the harbor on a bad day, and right now they were narrowed at the cup.
“You asked Raj what I drink.”
“I asked everybody what you drink. Raj is the only one who’d met you.” I backed up, hands where she could see them, like she was a ref and I was trying not to get tossed. “I’m not trying anything. It’s a coffee. It’s three bucks and a parking spot. You can pour it out.”
She looked at me for a long second. Then she picked it up and drank, and her eyes closed for just a beat, and I want to say I didn’t feel that in my whole body, but I’d be lying, and my mother raised me better than that.
“Table two,” she said. “Sling off.”
“Yes, Doc.”
Here’s what nobody tells you about rehab: it’s boring as shit.
You’d think, with a woman like Tessa Quinn putting her hands on you every morning, that it’d be the opposite. And it was. That was the problem. It was boring and it was the most intense hour of my day, and my body didn’t know what to do with that, so it mostly just sweated.
The first week was nothing. Pendulums, where I leaned over the table and let my left arm hang and swing like a dead thing. Isometrics, where I pushed my fist into her palm and she said, “Ten percent. No. Ten. That’s forty. Do you know what ten percent is?” and I said, “I’m a hockey player, Doc, I barely know what a percent is,” and she said, “Then guess lower.”
Scapular setting. Band work with the yellow band, which was the band they gave to grandmothers. Ice. Ice. Ice.
And then the manual therapy, where she worked on the muscles around the joint with her hands, and I learned things about my own body I hadn’t wanted to know.
“Your pec minor is a disaster,” she said on day four, and dug her thumb in under my collarbone, right at the front of the shoulder, and I saw God.
“Holy fuck.”
“Breathe out.”
“I’m breathing out. I’m breathing out so hard. Jesus Christ. What did it ever do to you?”
“It’s been guarding for a month. It’s shortened. It’s pulling your shoulder blade forward, which is closing the space in the joint, which is why it hurts when you reach.” Her voice didn’t change at all. Her thumb didn’t move. “Breathe again.”
I breathed. She leaned in. And the pain went white and sharp and then, slowly, it opened up and went warm, like something had unlocked, and my whole arm went loose against the table.
“There,” she said quietly. “That’s it.”
That’s it. Two words. She said them the way you’d say them to a horse you were gentling, low and approving, and something in my chest rolled over and showed its belly.
I stared at the ceiling tiles and recited the Harbormen’s power-play percentage from the last ten games. Eighteen point two. Brutal. Which helped. A little.
She worked her way out along the front of my shoulder. Her hair smelled like something green, rosemary maybe. She was close enough that I could see the freckle under her left ear and the place where her pulse moved in her neck. Her fingers were small and strong and absolutely without mercy, and every time she found something tight, she stayed on it until it gave. She never apologized for hurting me. She never pretended it didn’t.
I’d been touched by a lot of trainers in thirteen years of pro hockey. I’d never felt seen by one.
“You’re very quiet,” she said.
“You told me not to be entertainment.”
Her thumb stopped for half a second. Then it kept going. “I told you not to treat me like entertainment. You’re allowed to talk.”
“Yeah?”
“Within reason.”
“Okay.” I thought about it. “Why physical therapy?”
“Because I like knowing how things work.”
“That’s a non-answer.”
“It’s a true answer.”
“Both things can be true.” I turned my head on the table to look at her. She had a little line between her eyebrows when she concentrated. “I fight because I’m good at it. Because when I was eighteen and playing junior in Kingston, I was a slow, big kid who couldn’t skate for shit, and the first time I dropped the gloves to protect our goalie, the whole bench stood up. And I thought, oh. That’s what I’m for.”
Her hands paused. She looked at me, actually looked, for the first time all session.
“That’s what you think you’re for?”
“Thirteen years of evidence says so.”
“Twenty-two goals says otherwise.”
I laughed before I could help it. “You read my stats?”
“I read everything.” Her face did something small and complicated, and then she put it away. “Roll onto your right side.”
I rolled. And when she put her hand flat between my shoulder blades to position me, I felt it all the way down to my heels.
“You’re done for,” Theo said at lunch.
Theo Lindqvist was our goalie, a six-foot-five Swede with a man-bun and the calm of someone who spent his workdays getting slapshots fired at his face for fun. He was also my roommate on road trips, which meant he knew way too much about me.
“I’m not done for. I’m doing my rehab.”
“You’re doing your rehab at five forty-five in the morning. You have never in your life been anywhere at five forty-five in the morning except a bar at closing.”
“That was one time. In Vegas. And you were there.”
“I’m aware. I was the one holding your hair.” He forked salad into his mouth. “Raj says she has a clause.”
“Everyone has a clause. The clause is like a team rule. It applies to all staff.”
“Raj says she’s the only one who made Kessler read it to her.” Theo raised his eyebrows. “Raj says she said, and he’s quoting, I don’t date athletes. I don’t date patients. You can put the pen away.“
I put my fork down.
“Raj,” I said, “has a big fucking mouth.”
“Raj thinks she’s great. Everybody thinks she’s great. Dima says she fixed his hip flexor in one session and made him cry.” Theo shrugged. “I’m just saying. If you go after her, Mase, and it goes bad, it’s not you that gets fired. Kessler would love to trade you anyway. You’ll be fine. She won’t.”
He was right. Of course he was right. That’s the thing about goalies. They sit back there all game watching everything, and they see the play before it happens.
I picked my fork back up.
“I’m not going after her,” I said. “I’m going to do every single thing she tells me to, and get cleared, and win a Cup. And if she ever decides she wants to look at me like I’m more than a shoulder, she can. On her terms.”
Theo chewed. Swallowed. Studied me.
“You’re so done for,” he said.
By week two, she’d moved me up to the green band, which was still a baby band but at least it was a color men wore. Then the red. Then she let me on the ice for the first time, skating only, no stick, no contact, with a red no-contact jersey on so nobody would forget and lay me out.
I nearly cried, getting back on the ice. I’m not ashamed of it. Cold air in your lungs, the bite of your edges, the sound of your own blades in an empty rink at seven in the morning. I did laps. I did crossovers. I did a lazy, stupid figure eight around the faceoff circles just because I could, and when I looked up, she was standing at the bench door in a team parka with her arms crossed and a stopwatch, and she was almost smiling.
“Your stride’s shorter on the left,” she called.
“It’s my shoulder, Doc, not my leg.”
“You’re guarding. Your arm isn’t swinging, so your rotation’s off, so your push is short.” She pointed. “Again. Swing it. Not high. Just let it go.”
I let it go. She was right. She was always right. It was annoying as hell and I’d never been so happy to be annoyed.
At practice that Tuesday, the boys ran a drill along the boards while I skated circles in my red jersey like a kid in a time-out. Ruiz, our rookie, went into the corner after a puck, and Hammond, a big, mean third-liner who still hadn’t forgiven Ruiz for taking his ice time, finished his check late and put him into the glass hard.
Old me would’ve been on Hammond before Ruiz hit the ice.
I felt it start, the old heat climbing up my neck. My right hand closed. I’d already dug in an edge.
Then, across the rink, I saw a navy quarter-zip and a stopwatch and a pair of gray eyes.
She wasn’t moving. She wasn’t yelling. She was just watching me, very steady, the way she watched my arm when she took it past ninety degrees, waiting to see if I’d hide the hurt.
I skated over to Ruiz instead and hauled him up with my good arm.
“You okay, kid?”
“Yeah.” He was pale but pissed off, which was good. Pissed off meant nothing was broken. “He’s a fucking—”
“I know what he is. Keep your head up. Next time you go in, look over your shoulder first.” I clapped him on the helmet. “And then go dangle the shit out of him and score. That’s how you get even.”
When I looked back at the bench, she’d turned away to talk to Coach Brennan.
But I swear to God she was smiling.
Saturday was a home game against Pittsburgh, and I watched it from the press box in a suit, which is its own special hell. Up there you see everything and you can’t touch any of it. I could see the gaps on our penalty kill. I could see Hammond sleeping on his backcheck. I could see Dima getting frustrated, which meant he’d take a dumb penalty soon, and he did, and they scored on the power play, and I put my face in my hands.
Then, late in the second, Dima went down in front of our net and didn’t get up.
A Pittsburgh guy had caught him with a skate, high up on the calf. Even from the ninth floor I could see red on the ice.
The building went silent the way a hockey building does, eighteen thousand people holding their breath. Our team doctor was already moving. And then a small figure in a navy quarter-zip went over the boards before the ref had even finished blowing the whistle, slid across the ice in her sneakers like she’d done it a hundred times, and dropped to her knees beside him.
I stood up. I didn’t decide to.
She had a towel on the wound and pressure on it with both hands. She was talking to him, right in his face, and Dima, who outweighed her by a hundred pounds and once broke a guy’s orbital bone with one punch, was nodding at whatever she was saying, holding very still, gripping her wrist like it was the only solid thing in the building.
She kept him calm. She kept the pressure on. She kept her body between him and the TV cameras so nobody at home had to see him scared. When they got him onto the stretcher, she walked beside it the whole way down the tunnel with her hand flat on his chest.
The crowd gave Dima a standing ovation. I clapped too. But I wasn’t clapping for him.
Theo texted me from the bench during intermission. Seven stitches. No tendon. She’s a fucking surgeon with her hands.
I texted back: I know.
Then I sat there for the third period not watching the game.
I found her after midnight in the empty treatment room, sitting on table two with her sneakers off, rubbing her own knee where she’d hit the ice.
“Shouldn’t you ice that?” I said from the doorway.
She jumped. Then she saw it was me and her shoulders came down about an inch, which was more than they’d ever come down around me before.
“Mr. Cole. You’re supposed to be home.”
“I was. I came back. Sal let me in.” I had a bag of ice from the machine in the players’ lounge, because I’m not a total idiot. I held it up. “Twenty minutes on, forty off, isn’t that what they say?”
She looked at the ice. She looked at me. Something about her face was softer at midnight than it was at six in the morning, the edges worn down.
“Give me that,” she said.
I walked over and gave it to her, and she put it on her own knee, and for a second we were just two people in a quiet room with the whirlpool humming next door.
“Dima’s okay?” I said.
“Dima’s fine. Dima asked me to marry him while I was holding his leg together. I said no.”
“Good call. He snores.”
That got a laugh out of her. A real one, short and surprised, like it had been knocked loose. I’d made a lot of rinks full of people scream in my life. I’d never felt anything like making Tessa Quinn laugh at midnight in an empty room.
“You did well this week,” she said, looking down at the ice bag. “Tuesday. With Hammond. I saw.”
“Yeah?”
“I want to move you to contrast therapy. Hot tub, then cold plunge, alternating. It’ll help with the inflammation around the joint.” She cleared her throat. “The tubs are booked all day for the guys who are playing, so it would have to be after hours. Thursday night. Nine o’clock.”
“Who supervises?”
“I do.” She met my eyes. “It’s a protocol. You can’t do cold immersion alone, it’s a safety issue.”
“Just us, then.”
“Just us,” she said, “and a thermometer.”
I nodded slowly. I didn’t grin. I didn’t say anything stupid. I’m so proud of myself for that, you have no idea.
“Thursday,” I said. “Nine o’clock. Not nine-oh-five.”
She almost smiled again. “Go home, Mason.”
She’d never called me by my first name before.
I went home. I didn’t sleep. I lay in bed in Charlestown with my shoulder aching and the ceiling fan going around, and all I could think about was the way she’d said it, like it was something she’d been holding in her mouth for a while and had finally decided to taste.
Cold Plunge
Tessa
I changed my shirt three times on Thursday, which was absurd, because I was going to put the same navy quarter-zip over whichever one I chose.
I told myself it was because the hydrotherapy room got humid. I told myself a lot of things that week. That calling him Mason at midnight had been fatigue. That the latte on day one had been a sunk cost. That the way I’d stood at the glass on Tuesday with my heart in my throat, watching him decide not to throw a punch, was clinical interest in my patient’s impulse control.
Warren Kessler found me at four that afternoon, in the hallway outside the video room, where I was arguing with Coach Brennan about whether a winger with a hamstring strain could play Saturday. He could not. Brennan wanted him to. We were at an impasse that was going to end with me winning.
“Dr. Quinn.” Kessler had his phone in one hand and the silver pen in the other, like he never put either down. “A word.”
Brennan escaped with the look of a man who’d been saved by the bell. Kessler waited until he was gone.
“Cole,” he said.
“He’s ahead of schedule. Full active range by next week, strength work after that. If nothing goes wrong, I’ll have him ready for contact testing by the first week of April.”
“Ready.” Kessler said the word like he was tasting it for poison. “I want you to be very conservative in your assessment, Doctor. Very honest. The organization is making decisions about his future, and those decisions depend on whether that shoulder is going to hold up. A thirty-year-old who fights for a living and needs surgery in May is not someone we offer four years to.”
“I’m always honest about my patients.”
“Good.” He smiled. “I hear you’ve been seeing him early. Six a.m.”
“Five forty-five, actually. He’s very motivated.”
“I’m sure he is. Mason is very charming. He’s also very good at getting what he wants.” Kessler tucked the pen into his jacket pocket. “I just want to make sure you know which side of the glass you’re on.”
He walked away before I could answer. I stood in the hallway with my hands curled into fists at my sides, my nails cutting crescents into my palms, and I thought about my mother sitting at the kitchen table in Worcester with the newspaper folded so I couldn’t see the headline.
Then I went back to work.
At eight-forty I filled the cold plunge and checked the temperature. Fifty-two degrees. I checked it again. Still fifty-two degrees. Water doesn’t change its mind just because you’re nervous.
The hot tub was already at a hundred and two, steam lifting off it in lazy curls under the fluorescent lights. The room was all white tile and stainless steel, a drain in the middle of the floor, a frosted glass door to the treatment room, and the thick wet smell of chlorine. Everyone else had gone home. The building had that after-hours hum, ice plant thumping somewhere far below, Sal’s radio playing faintly at the end of the hall.
At eight fifty-five, he knocked.
“Come in.”
He came in wearing black compression shorts, a towel around his neck, and the sling, and that was all.
I had seen him shirtless every day for two weeks. I had catalogued every freckle on his left shoulder for clinical purposes. I knew his body the way I knew an anatomy chart, origin and insertion, nerve supply, blood flow.
It turned out an anatomy chart was very different at nine o’clock at night with the door closed.
“Evening, Doc.” He looked around. “Fancy.”
“Sling off. Hot tub first. Three minutes.”
“No foreplay? Just straight into it?” He caught my face and winced. “Sorry. Reflex. I’m going in the hot tub. I’m going in the hot tub right now.”
He set the sling on the bench and stepped down into the water with a groan that bounced off the tile. He sank to his chest, rested his good arm along the edge and let his head fall back.
“Oh, that’s nice,” he said, eyes closed. “That’s real nice. Why haven’t we been doing this the whole time?”
“Because heat increases inflammation in an acute injury and you were acute.” I sat on the bench with my stopwatch and my clipboard. “Three minutes hot. One minute cold. Four rounds. You’ll hate the cold.”
“I’m from Thunder Bay. I’ve been cold since birth.”
“You’ll still hate it.”
He cracked one eye open. “You’re gonna sit there with your little clipboard and watch me suffer, aren’t you.”
“That’s the protocol.”
“You love the protocol.”
“The protocol keeps people safe.”
“Mm.” He closed his eye again. “What keeps you safe?”
I didn’t answer. I looked at the stopwatch. Two minutes and fourteen seconds. The steam had already made the escaped piece of my hair curl at my temple, and I pushed it back, and when I looked up, he was watching me do it.
“Time,” I said at three minutes, a little too loud. “Cold.”
The first round, he got in like a man walking into a fight: fast, no hesitation, all the way down to his collarbones in one move. Then the cold hit him and his whole body seized.
“Oh, fuck me. Oh, fuck me sideways. Oh, that’s evil. That’s evil, Tessa.”
“Breathe.”
“I am breathing, I’m breathing like a goddamn walrus—”
“Slow. Through your nose. In for four.”
He tried. His jaw was clamped and he was shaking, his right hand white-knuckled on the steel edge. Cold water does something primal to the nervous system. It sends you straight into fight or flight, and Mason Cole’s body had spent thirteen years learning to choose fight.
I didn’t decide to move. I just found myself kneeling on the wet tile beside the tub, close to his face.
“Look at me.”
He looked. His pupils were huge.
“In,” I said, and breathed with him. “Two. Three. Four. Hold. Now out. Slow. All of it.”
He breathed out. His shoulders dropped a fraction.
“Again.”
We did it six more times. By the end, the shaking had settled into a steady shiver, and he was looking at me like I’d pulled him out of a fire instead of putting him into a freezer.
“Time,” I said quietly.
He hauled himself out and over into the hot tub and made a sound that was almost obscene, all relief and gravel. I went back to my bench and didn’t look at the water running down his back.
“You did that on purpose,” he said, once he could talk.
“Did what?”
“Got down on the floor. With your face all close. So I’d stop panicking.”
“It’s a technique.”
“Does it work on everyone?”
I wrote something on my clipboard. I have no idea what. It might have been my own name.
“It’s not supposed to work as well as it did,” I said.
He didn’t say anything to that. When I looked up, he wasn’t grinning. He was just looking at me through the steam, very quiet, like I’d handed him something and he was trying to figure out where to put it.
The second round was easier. The third, he talked through it.
“Tell me something,” he said through chattering teeth, sitting in fifty-two-degree water up to his chest. “Distract me. Anything. Tell me why you made Kessler read you the clause.”
I stopped writing.
“Raj,” I said.
“Raj has a huge mouth. I already told him. I’m not mad at Raj. I just want to know.” The shiver was rattling his voice. “Thirty seconds left. You can tell me in thirty seconds, or I can ask Raj, and he’ll make something up, and it’ll be dumb.”
I looked down at my hands. They were steady. They were always steady. I’d made sure of that a long time ago.
“My mother was an athletic trainer,” I said. “For the minor league team in Worcester, when I was a kid. She was good. She was really good. She taped ankles and reset fingers and stayed up all night with guys who’d gotten their bells rung, and she loved it more than anything.”
“Time?”
“Fifteen seconds. When I was nine, she fell in love with one of the players. A winger. He was twenty-six, he was going to get called up, and he was going to take her with him.” I watched the second hand move. “Someone found out. It was in the paper. The team fired her for cause. He got called up to the NHL two months later, and he didn’t take anyone with him.”
The stopwatch hit sixty. I didn’t call it. He didn’t move.
“She never worked in sports again,” I said. “She sold insurance in Shrewsbury for twenty years. She never even watched a game. She used to turn the TV off if hockey came on in a bar.” I made myself look at him. “So I don’t need Kessler to tell me what happens. I’ve always had that clause. It just wasn’t written down before.”
“Tess.”
“Time,” I said. “You’re over. Get out.”
He got out. He got out of the cold tub, but he didn’t get into the hot one.
He stood there on the tile, dripping, shaking, bigger than anything in the room, and he looked at me like he’d just watched me take a hit.
“Get in the hot tub, Mason. You’ll get hypothermic.”
“In a second.”
“Now.”
“Tessa.” His teeth were chattering so hard my name came out in pieces. “I’m sorry. That’s a fucked-up thing to happen to a kid. And to her. I’m sorry.”
I’d told that story maybe four times in my life. Every time, people said wow or that’s awful and then changed the subject, because it made them uncomfortable, a woman losing everything for wanting someone. No one had ever said sorry like it was a real thing they could give me.
I stood up. I grabbed the big towel off the bench and stepped right up to him and wrapped it around his shoulders, because he was going to get hypothermic and that was my job.
“Hot tub,” I said.
“Yes, Doc,” he whispered, and didn’t move.
His skin was ice cold under my hands. Goosebumps everywhere. I rubbed his arms through the towel, briskly, the way you’d warm up a kid coming out of the lake in October, and he stood there and let me, his eyes on my face.
I could feel the heat of my own body rising up to meet the cold of his. I could feel how close we were, the inch of air left between my quarter-zip and his wet chest. His breath was coming fast and shallow, and so was mine, and that had nothing to do with cold water.
“You’re warming up,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like mine.
“Yeah.”
“You should get in the tub.”
“I know.”
Neither of us moved.
His right hand came up, slowly enough that I could have stepped back a hundred times, and touched the piece of hair at my temple that had come loose in the steam. He tucked it behind my ear. His fingertips were still cold. They left a line of fire down the side of my face.
“Tell me to back off,” he said, very low. “I’ll back off. I’ll get in the tub, and we’ll finish the protocol, and I’ll be here at five forty-five tomorrow with your coffee, and I’ll never say a word about it. I swear to God.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Tess.” His thumb moved along my jaw. “I need you to say something.”
“I’m not going to tell you to back off,” I heard myself say.
He made a sound low in his chest. He didn’t kiss me. He leaned in until his forehead almost touched mine, until I could feel the cold coming off his skin and the warmth of his breath on my mouth, and he stopped there.
“I’m not going to kiss you,” he said. “You know why.”
“Because of the clause.”
“Because it’s your career on the line, not mine. Because you told me what happened to your mom.” His voice cracked on something. “So it’s gotta be you, Doc. If it happens, it’s gotta be you, every time. I’m not taking anything from you that you didn’t decide to give.”
I want to be very clear about what happened next, for the record, because later someone would ask me, in a beige conference room with a recording device on the table, and I would have to tell the truth.
I kissed him.
I put my hands on his face, his wet stubble rough against my palms, and pulled his mouth down to mine. His lips were cold for exactly one second. Then they were not cold at all.
He kissed me back like he’d been waiting his whole life to be allowed to. Slow at first, almost careful, and then not careful, his good hand sliding into my hair and scattering pins across the tile, his mouth opening under mine. He tasted like chlorine and something underneath that was just him. He made a sound against my lips that I felt in the soles of my feet, and the towel slid off his shoulders and hit the floor, and I didn’t care.
I was pressed against him, wet seeping through my clothes, his heartbeat slamming against my chest. I could feel every hard line of him, every place where cold was turning to heat, and my hands moved over his shoulders and down the slope of his back before I remembered that one of those shoulders was injured and I was the one who was supposed to know better.
“Your shoulder,” I gasped.
“Fuck my shoulder.”
“That’s literally my job—”
He kissed me again and I forgot what my job was.
The radio at the end of the hall got louder.
We broke apart. Footsteps. Slow, heavy, the jingle of keys. A flashlight beam swept across the frosted glass of the door, a pale smear of light, and both of us froze, chests heaving, eighteen inches apart, his hand still in my hair.
The light paused. Lingered.
Then it moved on. The footsteps faded. Somewhere down the hall, a door clanged shut.
I looked at him. He was breathing hard, his mouth red, his eyes dark, his whole body tilted toward mine like I was gravity.
“That was Sal,” he whispered.
“I know.”
“He does rounds at nine-thirty.”
“I know.”
“Tess. If you want me to go, I’ll go right now. I mean it. Nothing happened. You can write it down as a hypothermia incident. I’ll back you up.”
I should have told him to go. I knew exactly what I was supposed to say. I’d been rehearsing it for twenty-two years.
Instead I walked past him, my sneakers squeaking on the wet tile, and he watched me go. I heard him breathe out behind me, a defeated sound, like he’d already accepted it.
I put my hand on the door.
And I turned the lock.
The click was very small and very loud in the tiled room. I stood with my back to him and my forehead almost touching the cool frosted glass, and I listened to the water dripping off his body onto the floor.
“Tessa,” he said. Barely a word.
I turned around.
“This is a terrible idea,” I said.
“The worst,” he agreed. His voice was wrecked.
“If anyone finds out, I lose everything.”
“Nobody’s gonna find out.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t. So you decide. Right now. And whatever you decide, I’m with you.”
I looked at him standing there in the steam, dripping and shaking and wanting me so obviously that it hurt to look at, and not taking a single step forward. Waiting. Leaving every inch of it to me.
“Sit down on the bench,” I said. “And don’t you dare move until I tell you to.”
