LUKA

I take the marker off her clipboard and write my name in every slot before seven, hard enough to dent the paper.

The name after mine is Halvorsen. I move him to Thursday. He'll live.

Her coffee goes on her table before she's in the building. Oat milk, one ice cube, cinnamon. She never could wait for anything to cool.

JESS

The coffee on my table is made exactly my way, which would be sweet if anyone here knew me.

It's still dark out on my first day, and the only other person in the training room is a skeleton.

The cup sits dead center on my table, on a folded white towel like a tiny altar. Oat milk, I can tell by the color. One ice cube, gone thin in the middle. Cinnamon on top, not stirred in.

Nobody makes it like that. The back of my neck goes hot, then cold.

Here's what I want today, and it isn't much. I want to get through my first morning as the Chicago Gales' new physical therapist without becoming the story.

A locker room full of players. A head trainer who called my hiring "a ballet experiment" to a reporter. And a clause on page four of my contract that I've read so many times I could recite it under anesthesia.

Staff shall not engage in a romantic or sexual relationship with any player. Violation constitutes cause for immediate termination.

I put my bag down very slowly, as if the cup might bolt. Baristas argue with me about that ice cube. My mother calls it a crime against coffee.

Page four is fine by me. I spent years keeping a ballet company on its toes, and men whose sport has a penalty box are not my type.

Then I look at the sign-up sheet.

I printed it last night, fifteen-minute slots from six until noon, so the players could choose their own times like adults. Somebody has chosen for them. The same name four times, in black marker, pressed so hard it has dented the paper.

Varga. Varga. Varga. Varga.

At seven there's a name crossed out with one neat line, and in the margin, in the same heavy hand: Moved to Thursday. He'll live.

The name crossed out is Halvorsen. As in the owner. As in the name on the building.

"Was this you?" I ask the skeleton.

His name is Doug, according to the masking tape on his forehead. Somebody has put him in a Gales jersey and taped a C to his ribs with white athletic tape, slightly crooked. He grins at me, because he doesn't have a choice.

"It's oat," says a man's voice behind me. "And the ice cube's there because you can't wait for things to cool."

I nearly drop the cup.

There's nobody behind me. There's only the door to the hydro room, frosted glass, propped open a hand's width. Through it I can see the blurred gray shape of a very large man sitting very still in a steel tub of ice water before the sun is up.

"Who told you how I take my coffee?" I ask the door.

"Nobody told me."

"Then you guessed."

"I don't guess."

"You're Varga."

"I'm Varga."

His voice is low and unhurried, with an accent sanded down to almost nothing, a little extra weight on the consonants. It comes through the glass and goes straight down the inside of my quarter-zip.

"You booked my whole morning, Mr. Varga."

"I booked an hour."

"You booked four slots and bumped the owner to Thursday."

"The owner's son." Water moves, a small, lazy slosh. "The owner I'd have bumped to Friday."

I almost laugh. I don't, because I'm a professional and he's a voice in a bathtub.

"How long have you been in there?"

"Eleven minutes."

"At fifty degrees, after ten minutes the only thing you're treating is your ego." I set the coffee down. "Out. Or I'm giving your hour to Doug."

A pause. "Doug doesn't have a shoulder."

"Doug has two. He just doesn't whine about them."

This pause is longer. When his voice comes back there's something new in it, something that sounds, if I didn't know better, like delight.

"Yes, doc."

The head trainer comes in at six on the dot, a big gray bear of a man with reading glasses on a cord, and stops dead when he sees the clipboard.

"Huh," he says.

"Is that a good huh?"

"Varga's never booked a PT in his life. He has his own guy in the summer and sits in that tub the rest of the year."

"So why now?"

"Couldn't tell you." He takes his glasses off, which I'm learning is how he's kind. "Want me to take him? He's a lot. Nobody would blame you on day one."

This is the sensible exit. I could hand the captain over with a smile, keep page four nice and clean, and spend the season taping rookies' ankles.

Nobody in this building thinks I belong here. Every so often, I agree with them.

"No," I say. "He booked the hour. He gets the hour."

He studies me over the top of his glasses. "You sure?"

"I'm sure. He's getting the session I used to give principal dancers who thought they were too good for the barre."

He laughs, one bark, and puts his glasses back on. "God help him."

The hydro door opens.

He's bigger than the voice, which shouldn't be possible. Wet hockey player, all of him, in team shorts and a gray T-shirt gone dark at the collar, water running off his hair onto shoulders built to hold up a bridge.

The hair is dark and a little too long at the back. The eyes are pale gray, the color of ice before they flood it.

I know three things about Luka Varga, all from the wall of the practice rink. He wears the C. He shoots left. And he hasn't missed a game in six hundred and forty-one, a number somebody has painted up there like a commandment.

"Dr. Novak." He doesn't offer to shake. He looks at the cup in my hand. "You drank it."

"I was thirsty. Don't read into it."

"I read everything into it."

"Then read this." I hold up the clipboard. "Four slots. Why?"

"So nobody else could have them."

"That isn't a medical reason."

"I didn't say it was."

My pulse does something it has no business doing at six in the morning. I point at the table.

"Face down. On my table I ask for a number and you give me the true one. Zero is nothing. Ten is the worst thing you've ever felt. Lie to me once and you're on his table until April."

"And if it isn't pain?"

"Then you give me a number anyway."

He looks at me a beat too long. Then the captain of the Chicago Gales lies face down on my table exactly as he's told, and the head trainer makes the noise of a man swallowing a laugh and leaves us to it.

I give him everything.

Copenhagen planks, his top leg on the bench, the whole of him held off the floor by one forearm and the inside of a thigh. Single-leg work so slow it makes dancers cry. Eccentric holds where you lower an inch a second and your body begs you to fall.

He doesn't fall. His hip drifts, once, too high.

"Down," I say, and put two fingers on the point of his hip and press.

It's nothing. It's the most ordinary touch in my whole profession. But under my fingers every muscle in his side goes hard at once, and he says, very evenly, "Yes, doc," to the floor.

I take my hand back. I don't look at it.

"Number," I say, halfway through.

"Four."

"Liar."

"Six."

"Better. Do you hate me yet?"

"No."

"Number?"

He turns his head on the mat and looks up at me, sweat in his eyebrows. "Zero."

The door opens without a knock.

The man in it is about my age, in a salmon quarter-zip and teeth that cost more than my car. He has a coffee in each hand and a smile like a parking ticket.

"Dr. Novak. Trent Halvorsen. Welcome aboard." He lifts one of the coffees at me. "I'm on your sheet at seven. Lower back. Golf."

Then he sees the margin, and his smile stays where it is while the rest of his face leaves.

"Varga. This is cute."

Luka is in a side plank on the floor, propped on one forearm, his body a straight line from heel to ear. He doesn't come out of it. He doesn't even look up.

"Thursday, Trent."

"I'm the vice president of hockey operations."

"I know. Your father asked me to keep you out of the medical rooms after last spring." He holds the plank, not even breathing hard. "Should I tell him you forgot?"

He says it the way you'd read out a practice schedule. Nobody raises a voice. Nobody moves. And the vice president of hockey operations stands in my doorway holding two coffees, and slowly goes the color of his sweater.

He looks at me instead. "Read your contract, doc. Page four's my favorite."

The door swings shut behind him.

I let the silence sit until I'm sure my voice will behave. "What happened last spring?"

Luka lowers himself to the floor, an inch a second, perfectly, as if I'm still counting.

"Nothing that's going to happen to you," he says.

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one that matters."

"You don't get to decide what matters in my room, Mr. Varga."

He considers that, on his back on my floor, breathing hard at last. "No," he agrees. "I don't."

Near the end of the hour he sits up on the edge of the table, flushed and damp, and says, "Left shoulder."

"What about it?"

"Check it."

So I do. I stand behind him and put both hands on him, and that's my job, I've done it countless times. Thumbs along the shoulder blade. Fingers in the hollow under the collarbone. I take his arm through its whole range, slowly, feeling for the catch.

There isn't one. His rotator cuff could be in a textbook.

"I don't feel anything," I say. "It's perfect. There's nothing there."

He turns his head, just enough that I can see the side of his mouth.

"Tape me up, doc," he says. "Then tell me again you don't feel it."

I should laugh. I should send him to the ice. Instead I take the roll off my wrist, because I'm petty and because he asked, and I tear the first strip with my teeth.

Kinesiology tape is a slow job if you do it right. You anchor it without stretch. You lay it along the muscle. Then you rub it down with your palm, again and again, because the heat of your hand is what makes it hold.

So my palm moves over his shoulder. Again. And again.

He holds still.

Not calm. Still, the way a dancer holds the end of a long adagio when every muscle she owns is screaming and the audience must never know.

His right hand grips the edge of my table hard enough to whiten the knuckles. There's a muscle going in his jaw.

"Number," I say. It comes out quieter than I mean it to.

"Nine."

"I'm smoothing tape."

"I know what you're doing."

"Then stop gripping my table. You'll dent it."

"I'll buy you another."

"It's bolted to the floor."

"Then I'll buy you the floor."

I lift my hand away. He breathes out slowly, carefully, like a man setting down something he has carried a very long way, and I understand, with my palm still warm from him, that this isn't a game he's playing with the new girl.

He has wanted this for a long time. I just don't know how long, or why me.

He doesn't leave. He gets down on the floor by the wall and folds into a hip stretch, both legs bent, chest forward over the front shin.

He breathes out on the four.

Not the three, which is what every textbook teaches. Not the five. The four.

I made that count up years ago, because the standard one made my dancers hold their breath. It lives in my head and in one rehearsal studio. I've never written it down for anyone.

I put it in the part of my head where I keep things that don't add up, and I don't say a word.

At seven exactly, he gets up. He drops his towel in the hamper and stops in the doorway.

"Dinner?"

"Page four."

"I've read page four."

"Then you know the answer."

"I know today's answer." He looks at the clipboard, then at me. "Thank you for the hour, Jess."

Nobody here has called me Jess. It's not on my badge. It's not on my door.

He's gone before I can ask him how he knows that, too.

The building empties after dark. I stay to write notes, and to sit in my own room for a minute without anybody watching me be the new girl.

Doug is still wearing the C. I don't take it off him.

"Don't look at me like that," I tell him. "He's a patient."

Doug grins. Doug has seen everything.

When I go to switch off the lights, tomorrow's sheet is already on the clipboard. Someone has printed it for me, fifteen-minute slots, six till noon. The first four are filled in, in that heavy, dented hand.

Varga. Varga. Varga. Varga.

At the bottom, smaller: 5:50. Which means the coffee.

I could cross him out. I could hand him to the head trainer, and keep page four clean, and be a sensible woman for the rest of my life.

I uncap the marker instead.

Above six o'clock, where there's no slot, where nobody else in this building will be awake, I write it in my own hand: 5:45 — Varga.