Page 32 of The Forbidden Center

The smile does not.

There is a professional vocabulary for the body in front of me. Well-developed posterior chain. Good scapular definition. Marked asymmetry through the right trapezius consistent with chronic guarding.

I write two of those down and have trouble with the third, because the room is cool and the skin has tightened across his shoulders and the hair on his chest is going gray in the same places as his beard.

I move around behind him, which the assessment does require, and which is also convenient for my face.

“There.”

“I can go higher.”

“I know.”

He starts to prove it.

I put my hand flat against his side before the compensation begins. “Do not.”

“I can take it.”

They have taken the battery out of the alarm.

Pain will not give me clean information. Pride will make it worse.

“I am not interested in what you can take.”

His eyes come to mine.

“Report where it changes, not where it hurts.”

He watches me for a second, then nods.

We try again.

This time he tells me when the pull begins beneath the front of the shoulder. He tells me when it shifts toward the neck. He stops when I ask him to stop.

No performance. No bargaining. Only useful information.

“Better,” I say.

“For you.”

“For both of us.”

I support his forearm and guide it outward. My other hand goes flat against his back, below the shoulder blade, because that is where it belongs.

He is very warm.

I know this because temperature is clinical information.

He smells like soap and cold air and something underneath both that is only him. I am aware that I took a breath in order to find that out.

Under my palm I can feel him breathing. I can also feel the precise moment he decides to keep breathing normally, which is an entirely different thing, and which means he is as aware of my hand as I am of his skin.

My thumb moves half an inch across the front of his shoulder for no clinical reason at all.

He goes still.

Not the stillness of a man protecting a joint. The other one.