Page 28 of Triple Play

I go into a straddle split, one leg planted, my heel against the wall above my head, using my body weight to deepen the stretch. It’s almost, almost enough. I lean myself deeper into it, chasing sensation, when heat prickles up my neck as if I’m being watched.

Blake’s still in the shower. Which only leaves Felix.

“If you’re going to stand there,” I call up the hallway, “at least come help.”

Felix snorts as if he’s surprised at being caught, then lumbers toward me. “Help?”

“Hold my ankle so I can stretch out.” As soon as I say it, my cheeks go hot. The water’s still running but Blake could be done at any moment.

Whatever. I’m just asking for thirty seconds of help. There’s nothing inappropriate about this. If I take it back now, Felix will know I consider this more than just asking a friend—not even a friend, an acquaintance—to offer a literal hand.

So I position myself standing with my back pressed to the wall and lift my leg in offering. “Hold my ankle so I can—” I trace my toe through the air in a gentle arc, ending with my foot by my ear, before easing my leg back down. “That work?”

Felix’s throat bobs from beneath the forest of his beard. “Yeah.”

I raise my leg. Felix grasps it, right at the hem of my leggings, fingers bright points of contact on my skin. I’m about to tell him to start lifting when his thumb brushes the scar at my ankle, still shiny from being so recently healed.

“How’d this happen?” he asks, low.

Fuck, this was probably an unavoidable conversation. “I had ankle surgery.”

“How’d you hurt it?” he asks. Most people don’t even bother inquiring. They take two unrelated facts—stripper, ankle injury—and connect them. Felix doesn’t. For that alone, he deserves the truth.

“Tripped in the club parking lot in the dark.”

“You were walking alone in the parking lot at night?”

“Yeah, they let women do that now,” I say sarcastically. “It’s just one of those things that happens. I was rushing and caught one of those damn potholes at a bad angle. So: surgery.”

“Why were you rushing?”

He’s still holding my ankle. I could just tell him to drop it and the subject. “I thought one of the customers might have been following me.”

Felix grunts at that. No, not a grunt. An actual growl. “Were they?”

“I don’t know.” Which is true. One minute I was speed-walking. The next I was on the jagged asphalt holding my ankle. If I was being followed, I probably scared them off by screaming fuck and immediately calling the house manager to get someone to take me to the ER. “If he was, he left me there.”

Felix’s hand, the one not holding my ankle, curls into a fist like he might go fight that customer on my behalf. “When was this?”

“Last June.”

“When in June?”

“You know what day.”

He makes a noise, a single Fuck. His thumb strokes my ankle, tracing the line of my scar. “What’d you tell Forsyth about this?”

“The truth—that I hurt it tripping in a parking lot.”

“So the Shira truth.”

“Yes,” I snap. “The Shira truth. I did hurt it tripping in a parking lot. I did spend months in a walking boot and going to PT. Even now I have to be careful with it.” And everything cost a fortune, I don’t add. I have health insurance—bad health insurance. Which means I also have a high deductible and a drained bank account.

“You could’ve let me know.” His voice has a flavor to it that’s not quite anger, something closer to indignation. “Friends tell each other when shit happens.”

I blink. “Sorry?” Sorry I didn’t call you. Sorry I didn’t know we were friends like that. “What would you have done?”

“Sent you money, for starters.”

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