Notes

The first words out of Scott's mouth when Tessa wakes up in recovery are that this time will be different, he's already arranged everything with Marina and Igor and Kate, he's scheduled long weekends to stay with her and help her out, and he won't hear any arguments.

"What, out of guilt?" she teases him blearily, but she's not too disoriented to notice his expression darken and his mouth twist into a grimace. She's an idiot, of course it's out of guilt. "No, sorry," she adds, "I'm sorry, Scott, I didn't mean it. Yes, please visit. I'd like the company."

After she's discharged she spends a few days being fussed over by her mother and reacclimating to the use of crutches. Then Scott drives up to take her back to her own second storey walkup, where she's looking forward to being encloistered, as she puts it to Kate, for the balance of her recovery time.

The leaves had fallen all at once while she was in the hospital or at Kate's. It seems impossible to discern how much time has passed. Her breath freezes when he carries her from his car up the fire escape stairs from the parking lot at the back of her building.

She makes an arduous circuit around the apartment while Scott brings his backpack and her Tumi weekender upstairs. Jordan had texted earlier in the week that she would stop by to make sure everything was ready for her: she had obtained a surfeit of throw pillows and arranged them on the chesterfield; had pulled an ottoman directly in front of it; had left a stack of newish fiction on a nearby occasional table (The Sentimentalists, This Cake Is for the Party, Annabel, The Golden Mean, The Winter Vault); had stocked the freezer with icepacks and the fridge with snacks and Ensures, knowing how Tessa’s appetite suffered after the last surgery.

Her palms are sweating and blistered from the foam grips on her crutches. Her underarms feel deeply bruised. The bedroom, only down the hall, may as well be across town.

Scott appears behind her and runs his fingers lightly up her biceps.

"So," he says, "I made an agenda. We'll set you up on the couch, and you'll take a Percocet, then try to read until you fall asleep, and I'll wake you up in four hours for lunch and more drugs, then you sleep, then I'll order dinner, then drugs, then bed. A perfect day. I can't wait."

"I feel fine," she says flatly.

"You feel fine because you took a Percocet three and a half hours ago. Better to stay ahead of the curve and feel fine than try to catch up in misery," he says.

He's not wrong, but he doesn't have to sound so fucking superior, she thinks. It's not like he was around for any of this last time. She hates the feeling of fogginess and of being slightly outside her own body, she'd prefer to white-knuckle it through excruciating pain like she had been doing anyway for years, but whatever.

He's looking at her with an expression of concern that's more nauseating than the drugs.

"Whatever," she says, and lets him lead her to the living room.

The following morning, a Saturday, is the first one where it seems feasible to her that she might take a shower. She proposes it, once she's finished the coffee Scott brought in when he joined her in bed.

He slept on the couch among the throw pillows, but came to check on her and ply her with painkillers at six on the dot, like he'd set an alarm, which he probably had.

"But I might, uh," she says, “Need help,” and she winces, it’s so embarrassing, "Would you—"

"That’s why I'm here. Come on," he says, getting up and retrieving the crutches from the corner where she left them.

In the bathroom, he turns on the water to slightly less hot than her preference but still comfortably warm, undresses her without ceremony or sentiment, picks her up and sets her on her feet in the bathtub, closes his fingers around hers, and guides them to the handrail.

"Good?" he asks.

"Could be better," she says, reaching back for him, "Join me?”

"So what, we could give you a concussion when you slip? Set back your recovery? Maybe another time," says Scott, gently disengaging his hands from hers and drawing the curtain between them.

He’s pulled a kitchen stool into a corner of the bathroom and he waits for her there, half-reading a Sports Illustrated he brought with him from Michigan, half-watching her out of the corner of his eye.

She spends a long time rinsing conditioner out of her hair with her head tilted back into the spray, but overbalances when she tries to right herself, dizzy from the heat, nearly toppling over.

Scott’s there immediately, his hands on her waist, stabilizing her and supporting her weight.

She's too shaken to argue when he reaches across her to turn off the water. He drapes a towel around her shoulders and lifts her over the edge of the bathtub, turning on the balls of his feet to set her down lightly, his arms wrapped around her ribs, like he's lifting her off a podium.

She's too worn out to interfere when he scoops her up and carries her to the bedroom, her sopping hair dripping onto the parquet floor, and lays her in the bed, tucking a pillow underneath her ankles and arranging the duvet tightly over her torso and loosely over her legs.

She closes her eyes, breathing hard, too frustrated to cry, and she feels his fingertips brushing away the hair clinging to her forehead, and then one soft kiss on each eyelid.

"Sleep it off, champ," he whispers, and somehow she does.

The next time she hauls herself to the bathroom there's a short, wide plastic chair with adjustable steel legs and rubber-tipped feet at the end of the bathtub. It's sitting opposite the faucet, directly in front of the handrail. The showerhead is tilted up toward it. Scott must have gone to a Rona or something while she was asleep.

It's humiliating to think of him scrutinizing her for weaknesses, to think of herself as a frangible body with needs to attend to, but he doesn’t say anything about it to her, and it does make the shower less exhausting the next morning, when he has to go back to Canton and she's left to her own devices.

He's only gone for four days, but his absence is smothering. He texts her first thing in the morning, from the rink, from the gym, from the bar with hockey score updates he knows she doesn't care about, to alert her that he's ordered her a pizza or pad thai or a donair and it's on its way, from home in the evening, in the middle of the night.

It's worse than when he didn't speak to her; she can't treat it with an air of normalcy because it's so far outside their normal.

So too is sitting at home in London by herself on a weekday in the middle of October, but at least this she can imagine as a vacation, and she does, sort of, reading everything her sister left for her and fending off prospective visitors with excuses about needing rest. She doesn't touch the takeout except to stack the containers in the fridge.

During the long evenings—even this far south the sun sets before seven this time of year, and daylight saving time isn't even over—she tries out a few reassuring reframing lines from therapy, tentatively, aloud into the empty living room. Even unpleasant feelings are value-neutral. This is healing, not a backslide. Postsurgical discomfort is expected. Waiting to recover is not toughing it out. I am not, anymore, doing harm to myself. Her voice sounds high-pitched to her, unconvincing.

It's not enough to drown out what she still believes to be true: she came back too quickly and pushed too hard. Didn't push hard enough for treatment. Let herself be talked over and condescended to. Ignored her own body because she could, because it didn't seem like a priority. Didn't take steps to mitigate. To whatever extent she's not to blame, there's an equal extent to which she was an accomplice.

By the time Scott gets back into town on Friday night, her mouth tastes like acetone and she's crawling out of her skin. She meets him by the door on her own two feet—after a week of shuffling around and cautious matwork on the living room floor she’s feeling much less precarious—and knocks his bag out of his hands as soon as he gets inside so he can sweep her into his arms.

"Hi," he says. "You're looking better. You were so quiet all week, I figured you might have died."

"Just tired," she says, sliding her hands under his coat. "It's so weird to text you instead of talk to you, I figured I'd just wait until you came back."

She presses her lips to his neck, then his jaw, as she pulls his coat off of him and sets to work unbuttoning his shirt and undoing his belt buckle.

"Are you sure?" asks Scott, stopping her with a hand on her cheek.

"I just need someone to be normal with me," she says, impatient.

"You want to fuck me because it's a habit," he says.

"You never minded before. If you have a fucking problem with me, Scott, I—"

He cuts her off with a crushing kiss.

It is a habit, but not a bad one. Tessa feels more like herself than she has in weeks with his hands buried in her hair and his breath hot in her mouth. She finally works his belt loose and manages to get his jeans undone and sinks to her knees in front of him, where she's stopped, suddenly, by searing pain in her calves, trapped in a half-crouch, disoriented, not sure how to get back up again or make it stop.

"Hey," Scott says, immediately solicitous, "Let me," and he pulls her up by the shoulders and off her feet altogether, cradling her against his chest.

"You don’t bend that way yet," he murmurs into her ear, "Let's leave it for now, we'll see how your physio goes, you shouldn't do anything that hurts."

It's worse than when he checked up on her every hour he was away; she wants to slap him for not understanding, wants to slap herself for not wanting to explain.

She wriggles against his grip and he sets her down carefully, hands still on her shoulders to make sure she can stand before releasing her, but she shrugs him off, grabs him by the waistband, and hauls him to the chesterfield, a few steps closer than the bedroom, where she sits in front of him, leaving him standing.

"Good workaround," he says, and she shuts him up by taking him into her mouth.

It doesn't take much to convince him not to be tender with her: she knows what sets him off, what will make his hips jerk involuntarily, what will make his breath hiss through his teeth. It's obvious he's trying to handle her with care as he strokes her hair, her cheek, her jaw, but the third time she swallows around him and then pulls back to scrape the length of the underside of his cock lightly with her teeth, he curses and shoves hard into her throat, like he knows she can handle him, like he's remembered she's his match.

After he comes she doesn't release him, wrapping her lips around him even tighter, until his whole body shudders and he almost loses his footing, bracing both hands against the wall. There are bruises blooming on his hips in the shape of her splayed fingers when she finally lets him go.

He collapses on the chesterfield next to her to catch his breath, reaching for her hand.

"How's your mood," he says when he can speak again.

"Oh my God," she says. "Why would you ask me that."

"You jumped me as soon as I walked in the door, and you never told me how you were feeling all week," he says.

"Here's the mood," she says, shucking off her sweatpants and bringing his hand between her legs.

"Oh," he breathes. He slides off the chesterfield to his knees on the floor in front of her, pulling a throw pillow after him which he sets on the ottoman, and kisses her left ankle as he takes it in his hands and lays it to rest there.

"Really," she says.

"We're supposed to keep your legs elevated," he says, shifting over so her right knee is draped over his shoulder.

"That's actually," she says, "Not erotic at all," but he shuts her up by sliding a finger inside her and curling his tongue softly around her clit.

It's too gentle; it's worse than nothing.

She grabs his hair in both fists and yanks it, shoves herself hard against his mouth. Scott gets the picture and slides a second finger into her, then a third, stiffening his tongue against her, biting her, pushing back as she thrusts her hips against him. When she comes with a shuddering gasp and tries to jerk away, too sensitive, he doesn't release her, pressing his free hand over her mouth, reaching deeper inside her, pushing her past where it hurts, until she comes again against his mouth, like he believes she is capable of more than she knows.

It's a long drowsy while before she feels up to moving to the bedroom for the night. Scott, apparently satisfied, doesn't ask after her mood again.

The next weekend is Skate Canada. They're under Marina's orders to put in an appearance so it won't look like they think Tessa's out for good. She still doesn't want to see anyone, but acknowledges that there are certain appearances to keep up. Her compromise, which they don't run past Marina, is staying only for the first half.

Outfit planning is fraught. Everything fits more loosely than it should; she recalls Marina telling her to cut weight and she's repulsed at herself for letting this happen, too. She settles on a pair of casual looks that will seem oversized on purpose.

They talk about what they'll say in the car on the way to Kingston. Scott's somehow convinced himself that she's too fragile to be able to sound optimistic about their prospects for this season, not that he had asked her how she felt, and volunteers to head off any questions about the immediate future.

"Like I don't know how to lie to the fucking press," she snaps.

He swallows hard but doesn't answer. They have very little to say to each other for the rest of the five-hour trip.

The next morning, the twenty-ninth, she ends up putting on a casual, detached tone and giving Rosie from the Star, who has long had affection for them, the partial truth: a laundry list of lies she told herself about her pain after the first surgery.

Her eyes flicker over Scott's face while she talks. He looks stung, won't make eye contact. Some of it is news to him and it will break his heart to know she kept it from him, but she doesn't stop.

He knew the gory specifics of her surgical procedures and that she had trouble walking to the cafeteria in Vancouver, but not how much energy she had devoted to convincing herself she was malingering, or how many doctors had told her there was no reason for her to be in pain, or how long it had gone on. The fucking gall to treat her like she's breakable.

Tessa watches as he fumbles a couple of softball questions about his solo training regimen, trying to give personable answers, not quite managing. She notes his clenched jaw with grim relish.

Rosie, either not noticing the tension or too polite to ask, wishes her well in her recovery and waves them off.

Scott sticks close to her all afternoon but finds ways to be distracted from the possibility of conversation with her, even from within arm's reach. He leaves her in front of her room in the Marriott after dinner without saying goodnight.

The next day is a Saturday, but Scott's going straight back to Canton after he drops her off at home, to make up for missing Thursday and Friday, even though it's a long drive to do in one stretch, he tells her in the car.

He only comes inside because she asks him to carry her bags into the bedroom.

"I guess," he says carefully, after he's walked with her back out into the foyer, "I'll be back again on Friday. Get some rest, T."

He looks at her like he's hoping she'll say something, and she considers leaning forward to kiss him, conciliatorily, or whatever, but she can't meet his eyes, and then he's stepping away.

"Drive safe," she says, and closes the door, and latches the deadbolt behind him.