Page 56 of Power Play

“It’s on the bone.”

“That is where the injury is.” She nudged it into a better spot and put her hand back over it. “Hold still.”

“I have held still for a doctor, a trainer, and your friend Maren, who made me follow a light with my eyes six separate times.”

“Now you’re going to hold still for me.”

She said it with no force at all, standing between my knees at a kitchen island late on a Saturday night with one hand on my face and my jersey hanging off her. For the first time since she’d moved in, she was above me, and I had no complaints about the view.

“Twenty minutes,” she said. “Then again in an hour.”

“I have a game Tuesday.”

“You have twenty minutes.”

“Delaney.”

“Do not Delaney me. I watched a man drive his shoulder into your jaw at twenty-two miles an hour and then I sat in a building full of strangers and watched you not get up, and you are going to hold this ice on your face for twenty minutes if I have to stand here and hold it for you.”

Her voice split a little at the end of it. She kept the ice steady as if it hadn’t.

I wanted to put my hands on her waist and pull her in the last six inches. I left my hands on my thighs.

She was close, and she’d brought my own building in with her, the cold rubber and refrigerated air that got into a person’s hair at a rink. Under it was her shampoo. Her other hand had settled on my shoulder to steady herself, and I’d have bet money she had no idea it was there. I knew where it was.

The refrigerator ran behind her and then cut out, and after it cut out her breathing was the only sound left in my kitchen.

“You’re being very bossy,” I said.

“Someone has to be.” She moved the ice a fraction. “Tilt.”

I tilted.

“Good,” she said.

She didn’t appear to know what she’d just done. She said it absently, in the voice she used on Iris holding still for a bandage, and it cut straight through the middle of me.

“Keep that up,” I said, “and I’ll put you over my knee.”

I knew how it sounded as it left my mouth, and I let it stand.

Iris called me Daddy all day long, and from the first time she said it the word had meant one thing to me and one thing only. Now I was on a stool in my own kitchen with Delaney in my jersey, and the word was about to pick up a second meaning. I waited to be disgusted with myself, and gave it a fair chance, and it never showed. Heat showed instead, and I was hard on that stool with an ice pack against my face and my daughter’s dragon across the room, and I didn’t want one second of it back.

Her hand stopped on my face. She didn’t step away. She didn’t laugh it off. She was between my knees with a bag of ice against my cheekbone, looking at me from ten inches away. Her breath caught on the way in and didn’t return.

“That’s not funny,” she said.

“I didn’t say it to be funny.”

The color climbed her throat and across her face and into her ears, and she didn’t look away while it did.

“Eli.”

“Yeah.”

“Would you?”

She let the question sit where it landed. Then it caught up with her, what she’d said out loud and the voice she’d said it in.