Page 27 of Rookie Recovery

And he liked the rain (probably) and kicking orphans (also probably) and not fucking me. And he undoubtedly liked boring movies, like art house ones that were actually two-hour-long acid-induced perfume ads. And I expect he had a lint roller he was on first-name terms with. And he’d most likely, and more than once I suspected, been visited by ghosts of Christmases Past, Present, and Yet to Come.

He probably hated Monsters, Inc. Or worse still, never watched it. Dismissed it as childish nonsense.

Oh, my God, what if he’d never seen Shrek?!

But he does like you, a tiny hopeful voice in my head told me. Otherwise he would have just palmed you off with any old available massage therapist.

There was truth in that. Or at least, I wanted there to be truth in that. So maybe he liked me, I didn’t know. But he loved hockey. That much, I was sure of. Down to the marrow of my bones. Down to the marrow of his bones.

It was something else. The root cause of this chronic grumpiness. Not hockey, but something much deeper.

“I’m gonna hit the showers. You coming? I’ve got an appointment with the doc in half an hour,” I said. One the doc had deliberately, or not deliberately and I was reading too much into it, left un-rescheduled.

“Sure,” Rowan replied. “So, what injury you got this time?”

I shrugged. “Maybe a hernia?” I said, to which Rowan let out a huge snort of laughter.

I was doing us both a favour.

This was what I told myself, anyway, as for the seventh time in two weeks, I headed to Jamie’s office with yet another self-diagnosed ‘injury’.

“Where’s the problem now?” Dr Perfect said, after I let myself into his office.

“No, hello? No, how are you, Bowie? No, I missed you. Come give Kitty a kiss?” Without invitation, I stripped my shirt off and hopped up onto his table. “Well, I missed you too. It’s my adductor muscles.”

“Your groin?” Jamie tucked one hand on his hip, crossed his feet at the ankles, and leant back against his desk. “Again, Bowman?”

“Mmhmm,” I said, inching the waistband of my gym shorts down a fraction, revealing that little V of muscle I’d worked so hard on. Jamie raked a hand down his face, and a victorious jolt travelled up my spine. “Think it might be a hernia.”

“A hernia?” he repeated. He inspected the back of his hand, fingers splayed, and picked out something from the corner of his nail. He was getting better at this whole ignore Bowie, pretend like he doesn’t give me a raging hard-on, hide how much I’m into it deal.

It meant that I needed to up the ante. “Why don’t you come over here and examine the affected area?”

“There’s nothing wrong with you, Bowman.”

“What if there is, though? And you miss the signs, and I have actually got a hernia, and I end up missing the season because you didn’t take me seriously?”

Jamie’s half-smile dropped faster than Rowan MacKenzie’s gloves. I’d hit a nerve. Somehow. He went from affected boredom/slightly amused, to about to use his angry dad voice. I braced myself for the impact. But Jamie immediately fixed his face into the passive, done-with-my-shit default expression he always wore.

“You’re right,” he said, closing the gap between us. “We absolutely cannot have you suffering because of an oversight on my part. I wouldn’t want to throw away someone else’s hockey career.”

Something about the words he’d said, or how he’d said them, rang like a hollow bell in my chest.

“Shorts off, Bowman.”

“Uh …” I spluttered, my earlier bravado nowhere to be seen.

“No need to be shy. Shorts off. You can leave your underwear on.” His expression was flat, deadpan, but there was an edge to his voice I couldn’t quite place. “If you’re going to come to my office with a suspected hernia, you can bet your chirpy British ass I’m going to take it seriously.”

My brain came up with the responding quip. But my mouth didn’t utter it. Something along the way filtered it. Stopped it from making its way out. So instead, I scooted my shorts down my legs, and tried, with all my might, not to feel completely swallowed by the swelling wave of shame.

Except I didn’t fully understand what I’d said to trigger the change. He was a grumpy, serious person anyway. I was used to grumpy, serious Jamie. Would normally be doing everything in my power to poke the bear, or Debbie the rottweiler. But this time, his grumpy seriousness felt different. Somehow more real. And I felt as though perhaps, sometimes, Debbie ought not be poked.

“Okay, lie down,” Jamie said.

I obeyed, and lay on my back, staring up at the ceiling. Jamie crossed the room, and I heard, rather than saw, him washing his hands in the little sink. He tore paper towels from the dispenser and opened the step-open waste bin with such force it sounded like a cymbal crashing against the wall.

“Which side?” Jamie said, reappearing near my feet.

---