Chapter 23: Holy
The hot water beat down in a relentless, steaming curtain. Evan stood with his head bowed, letting it sluice over the back of his neck, his shoulders rigid with a tension that had nothing to do with the game. The bruise on his left deltoid was a vile, blossoming thing; shades of deep plum and mustard yellow mottling the powerful curve of muscle. It was a tattoo of violence, paid for in yards gained.
The glass door slid open. A cool draft hit his calves, then the warmth of her body followed. She didn’t say a word. Her fingertips, cool against his wet skin, found the periphery of the bruise first, tracing the edges where the discoloration faded into tan. He flinched, not from pain, but from the shock of the tenderness.
“Jesus,” she breathed, her voice almost lost in the spray.
“It looks worse than it is.”
“Liar.” Her touch grew firmer, mapping the damage. Her other hand came up, sliding over his right shoulder, holding him steady as if he might drift away. She pressed her lips to the uninjured side of his spine, a kiss that was more feeling than gesture. “All that noise. All those people. For this.”
“For this,” he agreed, his voice a low rumble. He turned slowly under her hands, the water slicking his dark hair back from his forehead. His eyes were the pale, clear grey of a winter sea. He looked stripped, more vulnerable than she’d ever seen him, despite the formidable cut of his body under the streams.
Her gaze traveled down his chest, over the plains of his abdomen, lower. He was already half-hard, arousal stirring amidst the exhaustion. It was a purely physical response to her presence, uncomplicated and honest. She reached for the bar of soap, working it into a lather in her hands. She started with his neck, her strong fingers kneading the corded muscles there. He groaned, a sound of profound relief, and let his head fall forward.
She washed him with a methodical, possessive care. Over the broad shelf of his chest, circling his nipples which tightened instantly under her sudsy touch. Down the defined grooves of his torso, her nails lightly scraping through the lather. She sank to her knees on the textured tile, her hands gliding over the tight muscles of his thighs, soaping the dense thatch of dark hair between them.
He looked down at her, water cascading over his face. Her eyes were locked on his cock as she took him in her soap-slick hand. She stroked him slowly, from root to tip, her thumb smearing pre-cum into the lather. “Look at you,” she murmured, almost to herself. “All this strength. And it just takes one hit.”
“It takes more than one,” he said, his voice tight. He threaded his fingers through her wet hair, not guiding, just holding.
“I know.” She leaned forward and took him into her mouth.
The heat of her, the wet, silken pressure, was an electric jolt that straightened his spine. A ragged curse vaporized in the steam. Her tongue worked the sensitive underside of his shaft as she took him deeper, her hand cupping and rolling his balls. She worshiped him with a focused, filthy determination, as if trying to suck the brittle tension and the memory of the hit clean out of him. The sounds were obscene and perfect: the slick, rhythmic slide, his harsh gasps echoing off the tile, the constant patter of the shower.
He was throbbing in her mouth, his thighs trembling. “Lena… fuck, I’m gonna…”
She pulled off with a wet pop, looking up at him. Her lips were swollen, her chin slick. “Not yet.” She rose, her body glistening under the water. She turned, bracing her hands against the wall. “Now. I need to feel you. Hard.”
He needed no further invitation. He nudged her legs wider with his knee, his hands gripping her hips. He didn’t enter her slowly. He sheathed himself in one deep, relentless thrust that forced a choked cry from her throat. She was tight and soaking wet, clenching around him instantly.
“God, yes,” he snarled, his forehead dropping between her shoulder blades.
He set a punishing pace, each drive of his hips slamming her palms against the shower wall. The sting of the impact, the scalding water, the brutal fullness of him—it coalesced into a single, white-hot point of sensation. This wasn’t gentle. It was a claiming, a reinforcement. It was his body proving its resilience against hers, and hers answering back, accepting every inch, every jolt.
“That’s it,” she panted, pushing back against him. “Fucking use it. Use all that anger.”
It wasn’t anger. It was a frantic, defensive energy. But he channeled it into her, his fingers biting into the soft flesh of her hips, surely leaving their own marks. The water ran into her eyes, her mouth. His breath was a hot gust on her neck.
“You feel it?” he gritted out. “You feel how much I need this? How much I need you?”
Her answer was a guttural, wordless sound of assent. One of his hands snaked around her front, finding her clit, slippery and swollen. He rubbed tight, frantic circles there, the pressure perfectly in sync with his thrusts. The dual assault was overwhelming. Her knees buckled, but he held her up, driving into her, his own release coiling unbearably tight.
“Come with me,” he demanded, his voice raw. “Now, Lena. Let go.”
The command, the relentless friction, the sheer animal reality of him—it shattered her. A violent orgasm ripped through her, clenching around his cock in rhythmic spasms that milked a roar from his lungs. He slammed into her one final, searing time and held, his body shuddering as he emptied himself deep inside her with a series of jerking pulses.
They slumped against the wall, a tangled, steaming heap of spent limbs. The water began to run cool. He was still inside her, both of them breathing in ragged, synced gulps. Slowly, carefully, he withdrew. He turned her around, cradling her face, searching her eyes. He looked wrecked, and peaceful.
“No shraplin’,” she whispered, her voice hoarse.
He managed a faint, exhausted smile. “None.”
They dried off in silence, the soft towels rough on oversensitized skin. He pulled on a pair of sweats, wincing as the fabric brushed his bruise. Lena wore his t-shirt again. The domesticity was a stark, soft contrast to the animalism of minutes before.
In the kitchen, she brewed coffee in the sleek, complicated machine he owned but rarely operated. The familiar gurgle and hiss was a new kind of morning sound. He sat at the island, watching her, his fingers tapping a absent rhythm on the granite.
“The team doctor called while you were in the shower,” he said, his tone neutral. “Wants an MRI on the shoulder. Standard protocol.”
She stilled, the coffee carafe in her hand. “Is it?”
“Mostly.” He took the mug she offered. “It’s… it’s the same shoulder I had surgery on in college. They’re always twitchy about it.”
The air in the kitchen changed. The ghost of his past, the one that sent beach photos, was nothing compared to the ghost of an old injury. This was a specter with real teeth. “What does that mean?”
“It means a day of tests. It means they might tell me to sit a week.” He stared into his black coffee. “It means every hit like that one is a calculation now. Not just for the game, but for… longevity.”
The word hung between them. Longevity. A word for careers, for investments, for antique furniture. Not for twenty-eight-year-old bodies built for controlled collisions.
“What do you want?” she asked, leaning against the counter opposite him.
He laughed, a short, hollow sound. “I want to play until they pry the helmet from my cold, dead hands. I also want to be able to pick up my kids one day.” He looked up at her, his gaze sharp. “I want a life after. I never really let myself picture it before. It was always just the next game, the next season.”
“And now?”
“Now there’s a pot of soup in my fridge that’s better the next day. Now there’s a woman in my bed who asks about my favorite fucking movie.” He took a long swallow of coffee. “It complicates the math.”
She came around the island, stood between his knees. She put her hands on his good shoulder. “So let it be complicated. The math was always gonna run out, Evan. The question is what’s on the other side of the equation.”
He pulled her close, burying his face in the soft cotton over her stomach. He held her there for a long minute. When he released her, his expression had shifted, hardened into something resolved.
“I’m going to do the tests. I’ll probably have to sit for Chicago. It’ll be a shitstorm in the media. They’ll say I’m soft, that I’m losing a step.”
“Screw them.”
“Yeah.” A genuine smile, touched with a familiar defiance, finally reached his eyes. “Screw them.” He stood up, grimacing slightly. “I gotta go. They’re waiting.”
He grabbed his keys and phone. At the door, he paused. “Hey. That bookstore you work at. Do they have a copy of The Old Man and the Sea?”
She blinked. “Probably. Why?”
“Never read it. Thought it might be time.” He gave her a quick, hard kiss. “See you tonight.”
The door closed. Lena stood alone in the silent, sunlit kitchen. She walked to the refrigerator, heard its efficient, whisper-quiet hum. She thought of her mother’s kitchen, the rattle and groan of that old Frigidaire a constant soundtrack to her life. That machine had run until its very last breath, giving every bit of itself until there was nothing left to give.
Evan wasn’t there yet. But for the first time, he was looking at the gauge. He was calculating the cost of the roar, measured against the quiet that would eventually follow. And he was choosing, deliberately, to let something new take root in that quiet. She touched the cool stainless steel door, as if she could feel the heartbeat of the new life humming inside it. It wasn’t home, not yet. But the seeds were there, waiting in the dark, fertile soil of their shared fear.
The fear, she realized as she wiped down the counter, was not a monolith. It had layers, like the bruise on his shoulder. There was the sharp, bright fear of a single hit, a career ending on a single awkward landing. Beneath that, a colder, more patient dread: the slow erosion of his body, piece by piece, until the thing he loved to do became a thing that only caused him pain. And under that, the quietest, most subversive layer of all: the fear that she was becoming complicit in it, that her presence was the soft thing making the hard things harder to justify.
She walked to the bookstore in the crisp autumn air, the city’s rhythm a stark contrast to her churning thoughts. The bell above the door jingled its familiar, tinny hello. Marta, the septuagenarian owner, peered over a stack of new arrivals. “You look like you’ve been wrestling with philosophy. Or a very large cat.”
“A bit of both,” Lena admitted, tying on her apron. She found solace in the simple tasks: alphabetizing the fiction section, restocking the local interest display, inhaling the dusty, vanilla-scented air. Here, stories were contained, safe between covers. Their endings were already written.
Her phone buzzed in her apron pocket at noon. A text from Evan.
Done with the scan. Now the waiting game. Feels like a damned butterfly in a jar.
She smiled at the image.
What kind of butterfly? she typed back.
An expensive one. With a possibly torn labrum.
The clinical term landed with a thud. She didn’t have to Google it. The context was enough. She pictured the delicate cartilage, the intricate machinery of the joint, stressed to its limit.
Where are you now?
Sitting in my car in the parking garage. Don’t wanna go home to the empty museum. Don’t wanna go anywhere, really.
She felt that truth in her bones. The limbo was worse than bad news.
Come here, she sent before she could second-guess it.
He arrived forty minutes later, wearing a baseball cap pulled low and a simple grey hoodie. He looked younger, and somehow more visible, like this. A few heads turned—a tall, broad-shouldered man moving through narrow aisles commanded a certain attention—but the bookstore’s clientele was politely incurious.
He found her in the poetry corner, reshelving Plath.
“Hey,” he said, his voice a quiet rumble in the hushed space.
“Hey.” She put the book down. “You find your butterfly?”
“Still in the jar. They’ll call with results tomorrow.” He shoved his hands in his pockets, glancing at the shelves. “So this is your fortress of solitude.”
“It pays the internet bill. And keeps me from haunting your apartment all day.” She leaned against the shelf. “Find anything?”
He reached past her, his arm brushing her shoulder. He pulled out a slim, worn volume of Hemingway. The Old Man and the Sea. The cover was faded, the edges soft.
“This the one?” she asked.
“This is it.” He flipped it open to a random page, read a few lines silently. His brow furrowed. “Man. He’s really just… out there. Alone. Wrestling with this giant fish until his hands are shredded.”
“It’s a metaphor,” Lena said softly.
“For what? Stubbornness?”
“For the fight,” she said. “For what it costs to bring the big thing home. Even if it gets eaten by sharks on the way back.”
He looked at her, a long, measuring look. He closed the book with a soft snap. “I’ll take it.”
He paid in cash, tucking the book into the pocket of his hoodie. Marta gave him a ten percent discount, not because she recognized him, but because, as she told Lena later, “He looked like he needed it.” They walked out together into the slanting afternoon light.
“What now?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Drive, maybe.”
“Can I come?”
He looked at her, surprise softening the tense lines around his eyes. “You don’t have to.”
“I want to.” She didn’t want to let him sit in the metallic silence of his car alone with the jarred butterfly and thoughts of shredded hands. “But I’m not just riding shotgun. I have a destination.”
She directed him out of the city, the towers shrinking in the rearview, giving way to suburbs, then to open highway flanked by fields gone brown and gold. The tension in his hands on the wheel began to seep away, mile by mile.
“Where are we going?” he finally asked, curiosity cutting through his quiet.
“You’ll see.”
An hour later, she had him turn off onto a county road, then onto a gravel lane that ended at a wire fence. A painted, faded sign read “Clearview Orchards – Pick Your Own Apples.” It was a Tuesday, and the place was nearly deserted. A few cars were scattered near a red barn. The trees, heavy with late-season fruit, marched in neat rows over a gentle hill.
Evan killed the engine. The silence here was the textured kind she’d missed. Wind through dry leaves. The distant caw of crows. “An apple orchard.”
“My mom and I came every October,” Lena said, unbuckling her seatbelt. “It was our thing. Rain or shine. Even the last year, when she was so weak. We’d get a bag, pick maybe five apples, and sit on that bench over there. She’d just… breathe it in.”
He studied her face, then the sprawling, peaceful orchard. “Okay.”
They got a bag from the sleepy stand. The air was sweet with the smell of fallen fruit and damp earth. They walked without a real plan, their footsteps crunching on the gravel path. He reached up easily, plucking a perfect, deep-red Macoun from a high branch.
“Show-off,” she said.
“Leverage,” he corrected, grinning. He polished it on his hoodie and took a loud, crunching bite. Juice glistened on his lip. “Damn. That’s good.”
They wandered deeper, the barn disappearing from view. She found a low branch laden with Honeycrisps. As she stretched for one, his hands settled on her waist, lifting her effortlessly until her fingers closed around the apple.
He set her down but didn’t let go, his chin resting on top of her head. She leaned back into the solid warmth of him, the bag of apples between them. They stood like that for a long moment, watching the wind shake loose a flutter of yellow leaves.
“I’m scared of the quiet,” he said into her hair, his voice so low it was almost part of the wind. “The one after the roar stops for good. I don’t know who I am in that quiet.”
She turned in his arms, the apples bumping against his chest. She saw the boy from home now, clear as day, superimposed on the man with the famous shoulder. “Then you figure it out. One damn apple at a time.”
He kissed her then, and he tasted like autumn and crisp fruit. It was a soft kiss, full of a yearning different from the shower’s desperate clash. This was a search for something, a tentative mapping of a possible future.
A group of laughing children rounded the row of trees, followed by tired-looking parents. Evan and Lena broke apart, a professional space snapping between them instinctively. He adjusted his cap.
One of the dads did a double-take. His eyes widened. “Holy shit. You’re Evan Cole.”
Evan gave a tight, practiced smile. “Hey, how’s it going?”
“Wow. Big fan. Huge fan.” The man fumbled for his phone. “My son—he’d die. Can we get a picture?”
Lena watched the mask slide perfectly into place: the easy grin, the arm around the starstruck kid, the patient pose as the mom fumbled with the camera. It was a performance he could do in his sleep. He was gracious, asking the boy if he played, signing a scrap of paper from the dad’s wallet.
When the family moved on, buzzing with excitement, the light in the orchard seemed to dim. The quiet they’d been cultivating felt invaded. Evan’s smile vanished as if wiped away.
“Let’s go,” he said, his voice flat.
They drove back in a heavier silence. The unspoken thing sat between them: the jarred butterfly, the photo on the beach, the eager fan in the orchard. They were all fragments of the same immutable truth—his life was not, and would never be, fully his own. The fear had roots here, too.
Back at the penthouse, as the sunset bled orange over the skyline, he tossed the bag of apples onto the counter. They rolled, a burst of captured color against the granite.
“That’s why I don’t go places,” he said, not looking at her. He pulled the Hemingway book from his pocket, stared at it. “There’s no ‘one apple at a time’ for me. There’s only moments between intrusions.”
“That family was nice,” she offered, though the words felt thin.
“They were. And there will be ten more like them tomorrow, and a hundred the day after that. And then one who isn’t nice. One who wants to tell me I suck, or that I’m a sellout, or who sends a picture of a girl from a decade ago to the woman I love.” He finally looked at her, his eyes blazing with a frustrated helplessness. “That’s the fish I’m dragging home. And the sharks are already circling.”
The word love hung in the air, undeniable and raw, surrounded by thorns.
She walked to the counter, selected an apple, and got a knife from the block. She began to slice it with deliberate, careful strokes, coring it, cutting it into even segments. The sharp, clean smell filled the space between his words.
“So what?” she said, placing a slice on a napkin and pushing it toward him. “You just stop living in the world? You let the sharks win by default? That family’s joy was real. That kid will remember that forever. Is that just an intrusion, or is it part of the thing, too?”
He picked up the apple slice but didn’t eat it. “I don’t know anymore.”
“The old man fought the fish,” she said, leaning across the counter toward him. “He brought it home, even though it was just a skeleton. Because the fight was the point. The fight is always the point, Evan. You’re just deciding now what’s worth fighting for, and what you’re willing to bring home, even if it’s chewed up.”
He ate the apple slice. It was crisp, unbearably sweet. He reached across the counter and took her hand, his thumb pressing into her palm. “You.”
“Me and your shoulder and your quiet and your stupid, beautiful museum of an apartment,” she said, her voice cracking. “All of it. The whole ravaged, shark-bit skeleton. You don’t get to choose just the clean parts.”
His phone rang, shrill and demanding on the counter. The screen flashed with the team doctor’s name. The butterfly in the jar.
He didn’t let go of her hand. He looked from the buzzing phone to her face, to their joined hands. The fight was right here, in this quiet kitchen high above the city. He took a deep, steadying breath, and with his free hand, swiped the screen to answer.
“Dr. Abrams,” he said, his voice calm, his eyes locked on Lena. “Tell me what you see.”