Page 13 of Tell Me Again

“You still living in Omaha?” he asks. He pulls the rack off of the balls and hangs it up on a hook on the wall.

“Uh, yeah, yeah. I, uh, just finished school in May, and I’m working at one of the hospitals in downtown now.”

He raises his eyebrows at me. “A hospital?”

“Yeah. I’m a physical therapist. Brenna is too.”

His expression shifts from curious to unreadable, and he reaches over and picks up his beer, then motions toward the table.

“After you,” he says.

I slip past him around to the end of the table. “Prepare to be stunned.”

I hear a huff of a laugh, and I glance up at him with another grin and then lean over to take my first shot. It’s predictably terrible. Even if I hadn’t been distracted by his closeness and his intoxicating scent and his muscles and... everything else, the shot still would have been pretty bad. I barely manage to break up the balls.

“That was impressive,” he teases, and he sets down his beer and moves around the table a bit, studying it. There’s a gleam in his eyes now. He adjusts his baseball cap again—god, it’s really much too sexy for a plain old baseball cap—and he chalks the tip of his cue before settling in to take his first turn.

“So...” He hits the cue ball, banking it off the edge of the table to knock the number two ball straight into the corner pocket. “Physical therapy? Do you like it?”

“I do, yeah.”

He sinks his next shot as well, then lines up for a third. He glances up at me briefly before focusing on the game again.

“Weren’t you interested in, uh, what was it, neuroscience? Or neurobiology?”

“Yeah, yeah, but”—he takes his next shot and misses, so I line up to take my turn—“when I was in my second year of undergrad—”

“University of Nebraska?”

“Yeah. I did some volunteer work at a senior center.” I totally miss my next shot. Again. I look up at Coop, who’s shaking his head.

“That should have been an easy shot.”

I roll my eyes and scoot back to watch as he sets up for his next go.

“Anyway, um, I did some volunteer work at this senior center, and what stuck with me the most was how much mobility affected quality of life.”

Coop’s paused, although he’s still leaning over, poised to hit the number three ball into the far corner pocket. His eyes are on me, but I can’t read what he’s thinking.

I shrug and give him a small smile. “So I did a bit of my own research and found that older adults who receive physical therapy are significantly less likely to experience a fall. And they also maintain mobility and independence for significantly longer than those who don’t receive physical therapy. So—”

He straightens up, and his expression shifts again to something a bit more serious than I’d have expected, given that I’m just telling him why I chose my career path.

I raise my eyebrows. “What?”

“Ah, nothing, nothing, just...” He lifts his hand and rubs the back of his neck. Then he shakes his head and leans over again to take his shot, angling a different way on the table this time. “My mom probably could have used someone like you her last few months.”

There’s a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. “Y-your mom? What...?”

He hits the cue ball, and it actually freaking bounces right up over one of the striped balls and then knocks the number five ball right into one of the side pockets. Without looking at me, he straightens up and studies the table as he moves around to the other side.

“Yeah, she got sick, uh, just after you moved, actually. Osteosarcoma. It was diagnosed stage four.” His jaw is tight now, but he leans over and easily sinks the number six ball, then continues. “It got really difficult for her to do even just normal things. Walking, driving, cooking. She had to stop working after only a few months. You remember how she loved gardening?”

“Yeah. She loved her roses,” I say.

His expression flickers briefly to something of a smile, as though he’s remembering her. But the smile is very short-lived.

“It was probably only, um, a few weeks after her diagnosis... Uh, she couldn’t even work in her garden anymore. It got too difficult for her to bend over or crouch down. Or, um, if she got down on the ground to work, she couldn’t get back up. I—” He stops and shakes his head, then looks up at me with a forced smile. And tense shoulders. And that deep pain in his eyes again. “I didn’t even think about that, and none of the doctors mentioned it. But maybe physical therapy could have helped her? Fuck. I mean, I know it wouldn’t have cured her cancer. Nothing could fucking do that. But to, uh, give her maybe a little something, let her hold onto some things that gave her joy for just a little fucking longer before—”

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