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October...
“Hey, Amber?” my assistant Liz’s voice rises an octave, and I know I’m in trouble.
“Yeah?” I call around a mouthful of carrot sticks, wishing they were a stack of pancakes right now.
It’s mid-afternoon, I haven’t eaten all day, and I packed myself rabbit food this morning, trying to preemptively curtail how many calories I’m going to be ingesting for the upcoming holiday season from now, and it’s only mid-October.
I’m preparing so I can be ready for my aunt’s world-famous (not really the world, but definitely my world) pumpkin pie with vanilla whipped cream, and a sprinkling of cinnamon on top that already has me drooling just at the mere thought of it.
God, I would commit a crime for a slice of that pie—if I had the whole thing to myself and didn’t have to fight to the death for it against my cousins, I’d topple governments.
“Mr. Kane is coming in, after all,” Liz says, her shoulders hiking up to her ears, as if I’m going to hit her, reprimand her, because she re-booked (for the fourth time) Brody Kane.
The Brody Kane who’s a class-A dick and an overall pain in my ass.
I’d gladly kill Brody Kane for a sniff of pie, a mere whiff of it baking in the oven.
I pull in a deep, deep breath through my nose, trying to be calm about all of this, when really, I had my day scheduled out, time-blocked to the minute, organized to every single task I had to do today, fingers flying across the keyboard to write up my reports on each one of my patients, and now I’m here.
The rest of the day is now ruined ’cause Mr. Pain in my Ass Brody Kane has decided to finally grace us all with his presence.
Liz hastily grabs my coffee mug, and I’d be worried about her sloshing the coffee around if there were any left over, keeping it out of reach so I don’t do something nuts like fling it across the room.
The man infuriates me, God! If he was on fire and I had a glass of water, I’d drink that bitch down.
Shit.
Brody Kane and I, we have a history, true. The kind of history that friends and family know of, but not my assistant, Liz.
She just knows the bare minimum—that we can’t really stand each other and that Brody hates, with every single cell in his entire being, that I am the one in charge, making him do exercises, testing his flexibility, mobility of his injured leg.
A history that I, for one, wish I could erase, just completely bleach from my brain. He’s honestly just come back in my life to torture me—obviously.
What I’ve done to deserve this, I just don’t know.
“Will you be okay?” Liz asks, and the way she asks ticks me off, too.
Because we both know I’m all talk and no bark, unless I’m really pushed to the brink, and anything Brody Kane says or does just isn’t worth my time.
You say that now, but he’s going to swear at you again when you make him work on his flexibility of his injured leg, and you know it. I’m a professional, no matter how many times I commit murder in my head.
It’s going to be fine.
Fine, fine, fine.
It’s not fine.
Brody Kane walks in a whole half hour late to his appointment, right when I’m eating my late-afternoon snack—a Cortland apple that I just picked over the weekend and had to convince myself to eat on the whole and regular before I stuck it in a pie.
Liz comes back to my office to let me know all about that asshole showing up even though I knew it was bound to happen, and I pick up my patient file, munching on my apple until I’m almost choking, wiping my face and sticky fingers before exiting my office and heading back towards the open-space area where we do most of our rehabilitation.
I want Brody Kane to not even notice my space, not to even look at it in case he contaminates it with his shit (and entitled) mood.
It’s amazing that no one’s lost it on him and brought him down a peg or two, honestly.
It’s not gonna be me, that’s for sure.
We have another twelve weeks of this, these stupid power plays—which brings us to just past Christmas (God, I’ve gotta put up with this until after Christmas?).
I can handle it, I’m a professional and I will not kill one of my patients, no matter how much his attitude is begging me to.
I chew on my last bite, pull myself to my full height, straighten my posture and get ready to rumble.
Brody Kane used to be pretty, back in the day. Soot-black eyelashes contrasting with his icy blue eyes, the kind that are clear and cold, the bronze skin, the kissable lips, the sharp jawline, it was all meant to devastate any high school girl and boy who took a single look at him and lost their collective shit. His cells, they recombined so beautifully, the way his muscle and flesh settled over his bones hit the DNA jackpot. But now?
Now?
Brody Kane has lost that roundness to his cheeks, the brightness in his blue eyes that I’d call innocence if I were looking for the right word. Those eyes are now steely when they look me over, sweeping me up and down, and there’s a split-second almost-reaction where I want to cover myself.
I’m pretty sure he X-rayed me with those killer eyes of his and figured out the color of my underwear, like he knows about my body piercings, the tattoo curling around my thigh underneath my work-appropriate pants, down to the sneakers I’m wearing, knowing I’m going to have to demonstrate some things, and heels aren’t really all that good for my balance to begin with.
I need all the balance I can get when I look at him, the inky black hair, the way it looks with those steely eyes, and then there’s the rest of him, and if I let myself think about the rest of him, I’m going to swoon right here, or drop whatever I’m holding while my brain sits and buffers while I process this level of hotness.
Too bad he’s such a dick though.
Too bad, too bad.
And I honestly wouldn’t repeat that mistake again...
Nope, not me.
Not gonna happen.
It still happens though, feeling like I’ve gotten a brick to the back of the head at the mere sight of him, and he’s not even wearing anything super nice—but maybe that’s the clincher, he’s just wearing a look that screams boyfriend, giving me the image of a cuddly boyfriend ready for me with open arms—until he opens his mouth.
“You’re late,” he says, glancing down at his expensive watch—the only reason why I know it’s expensive is because I Googled something close to it. He looks down at my Louboutins (sneakers) and shrugs—like he can’t get those seconds back that it took me to walk from my office to the rehab room. Right.
I don’t say anything, ignoring the burn of indignation sitting at the back of my throat, wanting to spill out in harsh words. It’s fine, I’ll run on the treadmill after, pump some weights, whatever to get my mind off of him.
It’s literally the third time we’ve seen each other, and I need alternative methods to cope with him as part of my day.
I nod, gesturing to the rolling chair (wheels locked, of course), for him to take a seat while I remain standing, and flip open his patient chart on my McGill clipboard and pretend to re-familiarize myself with his injuries.
“I thought you would have memorized that by now,” Brody says, voice a little raspier from how I remember it, different and yet not.
I ignore him, running my tongue over my teeth, glancing down at my methodical notes. “I have a lot of patients, Mr. Kane,” I say, off-handedly, flipping through the pages. “How’s the level of pain?”
“Fucking awful,” he says immediately, and I fight, I fight hard to not roll my eyes.
Not that I don’t believe he’s in pain. I wouldn’t be able to do what I do if I couldn’t tell when a person’s in actual pain or not, if their body has reached their limit for the day. Hell, I didn’t go to school for a million years and all those clinical hours to not be sensitive to someone else’s pain thresholds—and that they’re all different, depending on the day, time of day, and hell, what kind of food they’ve eaten.
I get it, I do.
It’s just I can’t really stand when someone’s late—it’s such gross disrespect for the person waiting for you, a middle finger up the nose that your time just isn’t as important as theirs, and it definitely shows what kind of person you are if you’re habitually late, without telling the other party why.
“We’re going to try to do some front-loaded squats today...”
Brody looks like he wants to kill me, maintaining eye contact now for seconds too long, and I know enough to say that he’s definitely not attracted to me anymore, so yeah, that prolonged stare? Summed up in one word—murderous.
“We’re not doing any weights or anything, I just want to see if your flexibility has improved since the surgery.”
“I don’t know why you make me sit if I’m just going to be standing,” he huffs, annoyed, voice clipped and sharp, like tiny stinging bees along my skin.
Sitting in a chair is basically a squat position, except you get to rest in that seated position.
I watch him stand up carefully, favoring his bad leg, getting himself upright before moving a few steps away from the locked-in-place chair. He makes a show of tying another knot at the waist of his sweatpants, and I resolutely keep my eyes pinned to his face.
It’s not like I don’t know what his body looks like, but when I knew him, his body was closer to that of a boy’s, when we were together that very first time, and now? It’s all man, and I hold the stare until my eyes begin to water, watching him blink first and only then do I do victory laps inside my head.
It’s the small wins, sometimes. It all counts.
I’m sworn at a total of fifty times with no exaggeration involved. Fine, maybe just a little. And maybe those expletives weren’t directed at me, per se, just in the general vicinity of my person, but it still pisses me off. He’s got the dirtiest mouth of all my clients/patients, and I see everyone, male, female, intersex, cis or trans, from the ages of eighteen to eighty-nine years old (Mrs. Murphy is the absolute cutest and I want to be exactly like her when I grow up).
We finish our two-hour-long session with flexibility moves and slowly increase his range of motion before his frustration finally peaks and he gives up.
“Are we at the end?” I ask, making sure, wanting to verbally check with him and then carefully dissuade him from doing anything else. We’re at the tipping point where the good kind of pain can change rather quickly to the bad kind of pain, and he’s already made excellent progress (despite being a total dick) three weeks out from major knee surgery.
It’s like looking at a stranger, the way he looks at me, teeth bared in a snarl, face a grimace of pain, his eyes squeezing shut to get that one more, elusive rep, before he collapses onto his back and just lets himself breathe.
I hate this part, I really do. I’m going to have to work on his hip flexors and we’re going to have to get close, the kind of close that I never thought I’d be with him ever again, and yet, here we are.
I’m almost afraid to touch him, and steadily move my mind to that blank place where he’s just another patient that I don’t really know, and I have a job to do, to get him better so he can eventually get out of my hair and go do what he was doing in the first place before he came back to Montreal.
“Are we not going to talk about it?” Brody asks on a hiss as I come down to the padded flooring on my hands and knees, alongside his mat.
“I’m going to grab your left leg now,” I say. “I’m going to support your knee and gently stretch out your hip flexors, if that’s okay with you.” I wait for him to give me his permission to touch him, my hands on my thighs, my knees on the floor as I watch him, doing the world’s best impersonation of a starfish on the floor in front of me.
Brody nods to himself, shutting his eyes against the bright, bright lights. The days are getting darker more quickly now, and the artificial lighting makes everything worse. “We’re not going to talk about it. Typical Amber.”
I bite down, clenching my jaw hard. I ignore the flicker of pain in my chest, the little stab of hurt that I’m being reminded of a past we could have shared, that could have brought us into the future, together.
But we just weren’t meant to be, and that’s the way the cookie crumbles sometimes, and I’m not about to pick up the crumbs. I have some dignity.
What dignity? You’re so lonely, you looked up how to get a platonic cuddler to help you fall asleep just last weekend.
And then Vick and Max came over and we had a cuddle pile and watched sad movies and bawled our eyes out. It was great, super cathartic and everything.
“Are you ready to begin?” I ask, prompting him to answer me, the kind of answer I requested.
Brody nods, then lets out a pained sigh when I place my hands on his left leg—the better one of the two, but unfortunately not his dominant leg—and get to work, slowly opening the hip flexors, working painstakingly slow to keep the injury from getting worse, concentrating on the feel of his leg and the socket I’m working on.
I can’t afford to be distracted by his beauty, by the way that if I glance over at his face, those icy blue eyes are slits, and my brain hopscotches over to an old scene, an old favorite, where Brody and I gave our virginities to one another, on my eighteenth birthday.
I clear my throat and ask, “How’s that? How does that feel on a scale of one to ten, ten being unbearable?”
“You’re a lot quieter than you used to be,” Brody comments, and the eye roll escapes me before I can clamp down on the urge. He snorts, and I glance down at him, his lips shaped into a grin, showing off that chipped incisor tooth that he never got fixed. I remember the feeling of it against my skin, little nibbles and bites and whoa, horsey.
“I’m working, Brody, and so should you be. Scale of one to ten?”
There’s sweat at the back of my neck and his nostrils flare as if he can smell it. Weirdo.
“It’s a seven moving up to an eight,” he says, and I gently, carefully fully extend his left leg all the way down back onto the mat and then practically crawl over to the other side of his body so I can get at his right leg.
He swears again, a murmured “fuck” that I tune out as I position myself at his side, glancing down at his right leg now, and slowly put my hands on him to get to work.
“I want another PT,” he groans, and we haven’t even really started yet.
“What?” I nearly drop his leg before I can be mindful of it and place it gently back down onto the mat underneath his body. I frown, eyebrows pulled down low. “Are you making comments about how seriously I take my job? Really? You?”
Brody pretends to pat at his chest, but we both know he doesn’t have a heart, not really, just a dank, old cave where things go to die, I’m sure of it.
“You’re hurting me, princess, right here,” he says, patting at his chest. It’s a callback, to way back when, when I thought that shit was cute.
It’s definitely not cute anymore. We’re too old for that shit.
Princesses have to follow the rules, and an empress makes her own.
I raise an eyebrow. “Are you being a misogynist right now?” Like he’d admit it to my face, or anywhere, for that matter. “Are you doubting my capability as a PT, or is it ’cause I have a vagina and tits that offends you so much?” I shouldn’t be talking like this, I shouldn’t be talking like this, but there’s just something about him that makes my skin itchy, all too tight over my bones and I can’t settle and just take it.
We’ve come far in the world, but apparently not far enough.
If he makes a kitchen joke, I’m going to throttle him. I can do it, too, especially in his prone position. Liz can cover for me, and all I gotta do is call Vick and Max and they’ll help me dispose of the body.
“Why the fuck are you looking at me like that?” he asks, rearing back as much as he can, scooting back a little, trying to put distance between us.
I guess I was broadcasting that particular thought too loudly.
Heh heh.
Take that, asshole.
“Amber, why the fuck are you looking at me like that. I didn’t even say anything close to that!” His voice goes higher in pitch and for a split second, I think he’s actually afraid of me right now.
I grin like a maniac, and Brody let’s out a pained wheeze.
“Let’s get you set up for your next appointment, yeah? Or would you like to be seen by another PT?” I say, getting up to my feet, holding a hand out to help him up, his palm slick against mine from all the sweating he’s been doing, some of it from exertion, some of it from plain old frustration.
Brody gets to his feet after accepting my hand and my little grunt as I lean back to pull him to his feet, his sigh world-weary. “No, of course not. I didn’t mean anything by it. Sorry.”
If my eyeballs weren’t stuck to the inside of my head right now, they’d have fallen out with how much they’re bugging out.
Brody Kane? Apologizing? To me?
What kind of world are we living in? Has the apocalypse happened without my knowing it? Is there fire and brimstone outside?
Nope, just an October evening, the sky getting darker and darker until there’s nothing left on the horizon.
“We’ll get you set up with another appointment then. You can head out to reception and my assistant will let me know what you decide.”
I watch him waffle, his beautiful face impassive as he blinks the sweat out of his eyes, his blue eyes practically glowing.
“I’ll do that. Thank you.”
I practically rear back from the force of my surprise, but keep my feet planted. I want to ask if he’s gotten some bad news, if he’s gotten sick, something—Brody Kane has been a pain in my ass ever since he got back into town.
I have the unique misfortune of my parents being best friends with his parents (seriously, they all went to high school together and the friendship never died, just got transferred to the kids), so I always knew what he was up to, how he was doing, his accomplishments.
He’s been back in Montreal for something like six weeks, and there’s been whispers down the grapevine about him relocating back home, professional lacrosse dreams crushed, winning the World Championships for Team Canada going up in smoke.
He moved out of province, but I was never really allowed to forget about him.
And now he’s thanking me?
Yeah, right.
I nod instead, gathering his patient chart and exiting first, walking back to my office without looking back, without noticing anything else about him that crosses the patient-doctor line.
“I’ll see you at dinner tonight?” Brody Kane asks it like a question, but it’s more like a confirmation of my deepening suspicions throughout the day, the curdle in my belly, the dread weighing me down since eight a.m. this morning, my mom’s phone call seemingly out of place and definitely suspicious.
Mom can’t lie to save her life, and I knew, deep down in my lizard brain, that something like this was going to happen now that he’s back—my parents (and his parents, probably) trying to be matchmakers.
I’d rather take a flying leap off the building’s roof, break both my legs and spend the night in the hospital.
I don’t dignify his answer with a response but keep walking and shut the door to my office firmly.
His laugh chases me all the way inside, and I can almost hear him as he heads towards reception.
Great, just great.
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