Chapter 24 - Three Days

The treatment room light is warm and amber, and Mia pushes the door open with the private hope that the room will be empty.

It isn't.

Elias is already there, face-down on the table, forearms crossed under his head.

His right shoulder sits visibly higher than the left—swollen, faintly red in the lamplight, undoing a week of careful progress in what she estimates was approximately two days of reckless training.

"You overdid it," she says, setting her kit down. The metal instruments make a clean sound in the quiet room.

He lifts his head. There are shadows under his eyes. "Post-season starts next week."

"Which is exactly why you should have listened to me." She pulls on gloves and presses two fingers to the swollen area—the heat coming off it is immediate, almost aggressive. He makes a sound low in his throat. "You promised."

"I remember."

"Muscle overload before a playoff run is how careers end early." She keeps her voice clinical, which requires more effort than usual.

"If this progresses to capsular effusion you won't be playing at all, which I imagine would be significantly worse than listening to me now."

He says nothing. She takes this as agreement and reaches for the ultrasound.

The gel is cold.

He knows it's coming and still tenses when it touches his shoulder blade—the muscle jumping, the vein in his forearm standing out against the skin.

"Sorry," she says, and smooths it with her fingertip, evening the gel across the joint.

"Mm." Muffled into his forearm, almost sulky.

She keeps her expression neutral.

The scan shows what she hoped—the joint itself is intact, the damage contained to the surrounding tissue. Manageable.

She puts the ultrasound down and reaches for the dry needling kit, calculating the approach.

To get the right angle on the trigger points, she has to perch at the edge of the table beside him. It brings them close—close enough that when a strand of her hair slips from her bun, it brushes his nose.

He doesn't move. She tucks it back quickly.

A dull thud from outside the door, then Lucas's voice, badly suppressed, "do you think they're about to—"

"Lucas, we're here for work."

Lisa knocks once and enters, Lucas behind her, already set up with a phone on a small tripod.

"Dr. Anderson thinks we should film some of the treatment for promotional content and for educational purposes," she says briskly. "Sports medicine outreach."

And then, just to Mia, a wink that contains absolutely no educational content.

Mia's hand slips. The pressure shifts.

Elias exhales sharply. His back arcs—a clean, involuntary line of muscle pulling taut under the skin.

Startled by the visceral reaction, Mia fumbles to adjust her footing on the narrow edge of the table, her balance faltering.

But before she can slip, Elias's hands shoot out. His large, heavy palms clamp firmly around her waist, anchoring her to him.

"Careful," he rumbles, his voice dropping into a dark, serrated register that makes her toes curl. "I'd hate to see you fall."

Mia can feel her heart hammering a frantic, uneven rhythm against her ribs—a wild bird trapped in a cage.

"I'm...I'm fine. I have everything under control," she lies, her voice breathless and thin.

"Well, well. Are we interrupting a private session, or did the air conditioning just break in here?"

Lucas leans against the doorframe. The smirk on his face is pure, unadulterated mischief.

"Shut up, Lucas! We timed this perfectly!" A grin spreads across Lisa's face so wide it looks like it might split. "Don't mind us, guys. Seriously, pretend we aren't even here. Just continue exactly what you were doing."

The spell is instantly shattered.

Mia practically leaps away, her face burning with a mix of professional horror and raw embarrassment.

Mia adjusts her position—properly this time, back straight, weight balanced—and opens the dry needling kit for the camera.

"Dry needling targets the myofascial trigger points directly," she says, in her clearest professional voice. "Faster resolution than manual therapy for acute overload injuries."

She inserts the first needle into the trapezius trigger point—quick, precise, the angle correct on the first attempt. His shoulder muscle seizes and then releases in the same breath, a slow wave of give moving through the tissue.

"Relax," she says, her free hand resting on his left shoulder without thinking. The skin there is tight. "The more you resist, the longer this takes."

"I'm not resisting."

"You're resisting."

A beat. Then the muscle under her left hand, gradually, lets go.

"Your hands are cold," Elias says.

"Compared to you, everything is cold." She finds the second point. "You run about three degrees hotter than the average person. I've noticed."

The second needle goes in.

Elias breathes through it, measured and controlled, the line of his back shifting with each inhale. From this angle—close, the lamp overhead—she can map the entire architecture of his shoulder. The flow of the muscle groups, the tension patterns, the way everything compensates around the old damage.

It's, professionally speaking, very interesting.

She finishes the sequence, steps back, and begins her notes. Lisa is still filming, very quietly. Lucas has stopped talking, which is unprecedented.

Later, she removes the needles with alcohol swabs, efficient and clean, already thinking about the notation format, already packing up—and then his hand closes around her wrist.

His palm is very warm.

"You haven't given me the aftercare instructions," Elias says.

She looks down at her wrist in his hand.

"No intense training," she says.

She holds his gaze and pulls. Not hard, just a clear signal.

His fingers tighten briefly, involuntarily, and then she's free.

The warmth of his grip lingers anyway.

"Obviously," she adds, "you'll ignore that."

She softens it slightly, because she's not actually still angry—or she is, but it's the kind of anger that lives next to something warmer. "Stretch the shoulder group tonight. Properly. Not a token thirty seconds."

"Yes, Doctor Mia." His voice is entirely too calm. His eyes are not.

Lisa gathers her equipment with the practiced speed of someone who has correctly read the room.

She takes Lucas by the sleeve on her way out. "We have what we need."

"But Elias hasn't—"

"We have what we need," Lisa repeats, and closes the door.

The room is quiet again.

Elias sits up slowly, testing the shoulder—rotating it in a careful arc, measuring the range.

The improvement is visible even to him. She can see the moment he registers it, the slight shift in his expression toward something reluctant and honest.

"Better," he says.

"It would have been better three days ago if you'd rested."

"It would have been worse three days from now if I hadn't trained."

She opens her mouth. Closes it. This is, irritatingly, not an entirely unreasonable point.

"Three days," she says, picking up her bag.

"Three days," he agrees. And then, quiet, just before she reaches the door. "Thank you, Mia."

She doesn't turn around.

"Rest the shoulder," she says, and leaves.

In the corridor, she walks three steps before she realizes she's still holding the alcohol swab she meant to throw away. She looks at it for a moment.

Then she throws it in the nearest bin and keeps walking, and tells herself the warmth at her wrist is just circulation.