Chapter 1 — Marcus
Seven days in a hospital bed will do one of two things to a man. It’ll break him, or it’ll make him dangerously motivated. I was the latter. I wanted out even though I had no idea what I’d do with my freedom since I was pretty sure I was not allowed to drink alcohol and I was craving a beer, nor do any strenuous exercise, and the way I had sex it was strenuous, so I guessed that meant I had to stay very familiar with my hand.
The hospital room was a good one, as rooms in Boston General went. Private. Boston Bruisers, the team I used to play for before my concussion and brain bleed played out on the ice in a friendly with Toronto, had arranged it without being asked. My captain and best friend Jack ensured I wasn’t overwhelmed with guests, and I was taking my recovery seriously.
There were flowers from the team on the windowsill that had passed their peak but I couldn’t bring myself to throw away, food parcels from some of the puck bunnies who Jack kept well away from me to my disappointment, and so many get-well cards from the fans I’d need a sack to take them all home.
Surely today my surgeon, Dr. Sarah Reeves was going to release me. Speaking of using my hand, I’d just jerked off in the shower imagining what lay under Sarah’s scrubs. She was too hot to be a surgeon. She could give old men a heart attack. Christ, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven when I came out of my coma.
She was leaning over me with a penlight, checking my pupils, and my brain was still three days behind the rest of the world, but some things cut through even a medicated fog. Copper hair. Not the kind of copper that’s just a polite word for dark red. The real thing, deep and warm, pulled back tight against her head in a way that made you want to find the pin holding it and pull it loose just to see what happened. Green eyes that were busy and sharp and completely uninterested in the fact that I was staring, because she was already somewhere else, reading my response to the light, cataloguing data, moving forward. Her mouth was soft and serious at the same time, which sounds like a contradiction and isn’t. The kind of mouth that looked like it didn’t smile often enough and would be devastating when it did. I had a tube in my arm and a skull that felt like someone had used it for batting practice, and my first coherent thought in four days was that the young woman standing over me was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life. My second thought, right behind it, was that she absolutely knew it and absolutely did not care.
And my charms hadn’t worked on her from that moment. Unlike all the nurses, male and female who I had eating out of my hand. Dr. bloody Sarah Reeves was immune to the Marcus ‘Mayhem’ O’Sullivan charm. And it bloody infuriated me and I don’t really know why.
What could a dumb jock and a brilliant neurosurgeon have in common?
Hot, fantastic sex. That’s what. I wanted her as much as I wanted to be able to play hockey again and we all know that was never going to happen.
I put her reluctance down to the fact I was her patient. Hence my hurry to be discharged.
Not that I had anything waiting for me if she did sign me out. My younger sister Jenny was moving back in for a few weeks to ensure I followed doctor’s orders and didn’t have any setbacks. And since the head knock on the ice that had seen me hospitalized had ended my ten-year ice hockey career, I had no idea what I was going to do with myself.
There weren’t a lot of options for an ex-jock like me who couldn’t read or write.
Besides, she had made it very clear she wasn’t interested. I’d tried. Me hitting on her, Sarah ignoring the flirtation like you’d ignore a bad smell.
Seven days of watching her move through rooms with that particular economy of motion, like every step had already been calculated and approved. Seven days of the copper hair pulled tight against her head and the green eyes that ran assessments I wasn’t sure I was passing.
She hadn’t smiled at me once.
Every nurse on this ward had smiled at me within the first twenty-four hours. It was not vanity to say so. It was simply consistent data from a large sample size. Dr. Sarah Reeves was the single outlier, and I’d had a lot of time to think about why that was.
I was her patient. I hoped that’s all it was.
I’d also had a lot of time to feel sorry for myself, which I’d been actively fighting since Wednesday.
I was still in the bathroom when I heard the door to my room open. I’d graduated from sponge baths to actual showers two days ago, a development I had welcomed with considerably more emotion than was dignified, and I’d just finished. I grabbed the towel from the rail and wrapped it around my waist and came out.
My shower dream was standing with far too many clothes on, at the foot of my bed with a tablet in one hand and a manila folder in the other, and she’d gone completely still.
I mean completely. Like someone had paused her.
To be fair, I’d done the same. We looked at each other across the room, and there was maybe two seconds of total silence, which doesn’t sound like a lot but was enough for me to notice the way her eyes moved. Not up to my face first. Somewhere in the vicinity of my chest and then lower, tracking what I would have described as a fairly impressive set of abdominals before she caught herself and snapped her gaze back to eye level.
Her cheeks had gone pink. An actual blush. Dr. Reeves, who had looked at my brain scans without flinching, was standing in the doorway of my hospital room with a pink face.
I couldn’t help the smile that crossed my lips. She liked what she saw. I decided this was possibly the most interesting development of the week.
“I knocked,” she said, with considerable professional dignity.
“I didn’t hear you. I was in the shower.”
“Obviously.” She cleared her throat and looked pointedly at the tablet in her hand. “I can wait outside.”
“You’re fine.” I crossed to the chair where I’d laid out my clothes from this morning. Jack had brought them from my apartment because Jack was a good man and an excellent best friend, and I started dressing. I dropped the towel without ceremony, pulled on my boxers and jeans, because she was right. She’d been in medicine for years. She had absolutely seen it all before.
But I still liked the way her eyes couldn’t look away.
She was watching me pull on my jeans with an expression that she was working very hard to make neutral. I could tell she was working hard because I’d been watching her face for seven days and I knew exactly what neutral looked like on Dr. Sarah Reeves. This wasn’t it. And she swallowed hard.
Thank fuck, she was human. I’d almost considered she might be a robot.
“You’ve seen naked bodies before,” I said.
“Frequently,” she agreed. She sounded perfectly composed. She’d gotten control of it faster than most.
I pulled my shirt on and watched her eyes follow it down my torso. Was that disappointment on her face as I covered up? She had her tablet up again, which was a nice attempt.
“So,” I said. “Have you got my discharge papers?”
“I do.” She set the folder on the tray table and opened it. “I’ll walk you through everything. There’s a lot to cover. But you can read them once you get home.”
She meant it helpfully. I knew she meant it helpfully. She had no way of knowing that those words landed on me the way they had landed on me my entire adult life, with the same mild cold dread I’d spent twenty-seven years learning to manage.
A lot to cover. Meaning a lot of text. Meaning a lot of pages that would rearrange themselves while I tried to process them, the words sliding and looping, my brain skipping over lines and landing three sentences ahead or four sentences back while someone watched and waited.
I put both hands in my pockets. “Can you just give me the headlines?”
She looked up from the folder. There was something in her expression that I couldn’t quite read. Not irritation. Something more careful than that.
She couldn’t have guessed. Nobody ever did.
“Of course,” she said, and she closed the folder without making anything of it. “Rest and limited physical activity for the next two weeks. No drinking alcohol. No driving for a month. The aftercare neurologist wants to see you in three weeks, and I’m going to give you a follow-up appointment with me in six.” She held my gaze. “The left-hand weakness should continue to improve with physio. If it doesn’t, I need to hear from you immediately.”
“Got it.”
“There are support resources in the folder, including a contact number for counseling.”
I looked at the folder. “I’m not going to call the counseling number.”
“I know,” she said. “But I’m required to tell you it’s there, and I’m also telling you, unofficially, that most people who say that find out they were wrong about it.”
It landed somewhere. I wasn’t going to admit that. Besides, the Bruisers management and Greg had this covered with their own counsellor.
“Dr. Reeves,” I said.
“Mr. O’Sullivan.”
“You saved my life.”
“I removed a hematoma from your brain,” she said, like she’d said it a hundred times, which she probably had.
“Which saved my life. I’ve been trying to thank you properly for a week and you are genuinely difficult to corner.”
One corner of her mouth moved. Just barely. “I have other patients.”
“I know. I’ve been watching the nurses ask you questions in the hallway. You answer everything in about twelve words. It’s impressive.”
That got me an actual look, the kind where I could see her deciding whether to be amused or professional. “I’m efficient.”
“You’re absolutely efficient.” I leaned back against the wall and crossed my arms, because I had approximately three minutes of discharge conversation left and I was going to use them well. “I’ve also been watching the nurses bring you terrible coffee and you drink it anyway without complaining, which tells me you’re either very stoic or you’ve been awake long enough that it doesn’t matter anymore.”
She was looking at me with an expression I’d been building toward for a week. Not quite the softening I’d seen from every other woman in this building, but something more interesting. Like I’d surprised her. Like Dr. Sarah Reeves, who anticipated everything, hadn’t quite anticipated me.
“You’ve been observant,” she said.
“I’ve had nothing to do for seven days.”
She tilted her head slightly and it was a very small movement, and it did something very specific to my chest. “You seem like the kind of person who doesn’t do nothing well.”
I stared at her. “That’s the most personal observation you’ve made since I got here.”
“It’s a clinical observation. Patients who are uncomfortable with inactivity tend to resist follow-up appointments. I’m noting it for context.”
“Right.” I held her gaze. She held mine back. Neither of us blinked, and it was the most interesting thirty seconds I’d had all week, which was a low bar but also somehow wasn’t. “Can I ask you something?”
“You can ask.”
“Now that you’re discharging me. Officially closing out the patient file. Whatever the technical terminology is.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly. She knew where this was going. She was smart enough to know exactly where this was going and she hadn’t left the room, which I was choosing to interpret as something. “Mr. O’Sullivan.”
“Marcus.”
“Mr. O’Sullivan,” she said again, and she almost smiled. Almost. “Whatever you’re about to ask, I think you already know the answer.”
“Humor me. I’ve had a rough week.”
She looked at me steadily, and there was something almost kind in it, under the professional cool. “I don’t date patients. Or former patients.”
“Former,” I said. “So, in principle —”
“And I don’t date professional athletes.”
There it was. Clean and direct, the way she said everything. I let the silence sit for a second.
“That’s actually good news,” I said.
She frowned slightly. “How.”
“I’m not a professional athlete anymore.” I said it flat and even, the way I’d been practicing saying it since Monday. “My career ended in this building, Dr. Reeves. So technically, I’ve just cleared two of your three objections.”
The frown softened. Something moved across her face that I couldn’t entirely classify. It wasn’t pity. I would have recognized pity and rejected it at about the speed of a slap shot. It was something more complicated. Like she understood, suddenly, what it had cost me to say that without flinching.
“Marcus,” she said.
It was the first time she’d used my name. My actual name, not the file entry. Something about it did something to me I wasn’t ready to examine.
“I know,” I said. “I know. It was a long shot.”
“It was a very long shot.” But the corner of her mouth had moved again, the same way it had earlier, and she was looking at me differently now. Like I was something she hadn’t quite finished figuring out.
She picked up the folder from the tray table and held it out to me. “There’s a card in there from the follow up neurologist. His number is on it. If you call his office, they’ll understand completely if you’d prefer to go through the information verbally.”
Why had she said that? Verbally?
I took the folder. She had said it without any particular emphasis, like she was tying off a clinical thread. And maybe she was. Except I looked at her and she looked back at me and there was a beat of something quiet and knowing between us that I couldn’t have described out loud.
“Thank you,” I said. “For all of it.”
“It was my job.”
“You’re going to keep saying that.”
“It’s going to keep being true.” She gathered her tablet under her arm. “Take care of yourself, Mr. O’Sullivan.”
“Marcus.”
She turned to leave. At the door she stopped, and I don’t know why she stopped because she wasn’t a woman who second-guessed her exits, but she did. She looked back at me over her shoulder and there was something in the look I couldn’t pin down, and then it was gone.
“For the record,” she said. “Marcus, you were a very good patient.”
She said my name and I almost dropped to my knees. “I thought I was a complicated prognosis.”
“Both things can be true.” She pulled the door open. “Six weeks. I’ll see you at my final follow-up.”
She left.
I stood in the middle of my hospital room holding my discharge folder and smelling the faint antiseptic-and-something-else scent of a room I’d spent seven very bad days in, and I thought about what came next. The apartment. The silence of it. The meetings that Greg, my agent, would want to schedule, the phone calls, the very long process of dismantling a career and figuring out what you put in its place.
I couldn’t yet think of a life without hockey.
Instead, I thought about a woman with copper hair who had become my fantasy to help get me through this shit. A woman with an ice exterior but hot curves underneath, who’d blushed exactly once and recovered in under a second, who had told me the most devastating news of my life with perfect composure and somehow made me feel like I wasn’t going to fall apart in front of her.
A woman who for some reason I wanted to make smile again.
What had happened in her life to make her the ice queen?
I had to know.
Six weeks.
I was going to take very good care of myself.
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