Page 71 of The Grumpy Defenseman
“I finished the game.”
“Those are not the same sentence.”
He reached for the takeout bag with his left hand, which told me everything I needed to know about how badly he wanted this conversation to be over.
I slapped his hand away.
“Sit down.”
“Sam.”
“Sit.”
There were moments in life when men like Evan McKinney forgot they were bigger than you.
This was one of mine.
He sat.
Good.
I went for the freezer. Ice pack. Dish towel. Anti-inflammatories from my second drawer, because apparently falling for a hockey player required emergency infrastructure.
When I turned back, he was watching me with that look he got when I moved too fast for him to interrupt effectively.
“What?”
“You get bossy when you’re worried.”
“You get stupid when you’re hurt. We all contain multitudes.”
That almost got me a smile.
Almost.
I wrapped the ice pack in the dish towel and stepped between his knees.
His hands landed automatically at my hips.
Not pulling. Not asking for anything. Just there, warm and steady, like some part of him knew exactly where to go when the rest of him was failing.
The contact went through me before I could file it under medical necessity.
His palms were broad against my sides. His thumbs rested just above my waistband, not moving, which somehow made them harder to ignore. He was shirtless in my kitchen, bruised and exhausted, sitting still because I had told him to, and my body was having several opinions I did not have time to organize.
“This is going to suck,” I said.
“I assumed.”
I pressed the ice to the bruise.
His whole body went rigid.
Not dramatically, which somehow made it worse. Just one long, silent locking down from spine to thighs, the reflex of a man who had spent half his life teaching himself not to make a sound when something hit bone.
His fingers tightened at my hips.
Not enough to hurt.
