Chapter 6: Mirrored Tension
The dynamometer beeped again. Seventy-nine percent. A negligible improvement. Statistical noise.
“Alright, that’s enough of that,” Hammy’s voice cut through the focused silence. He stood up from his stool, the legs scraping on the linoleum. “We’ve got the baseline. Now, Reid. Practical application. You’ve observed the taping for costal and scapular support. Now you do it.”
Roz’s head snapped up. “On him?”
“No, on the Invisible Man. Yes, on him. He needs the support for mobility work. It’s the next stage. Get the tape.”
Her mouth went dry. Taping was intimate, architectural. It required hands-on, inch-by-inch contact, molding stiff adhesive to the landscape of a body. She’d practiced on fellow students, on plastic torsos. Never on him. Not under Hammy’s watchful eye and the relentless, multiplying gaze of the room’s mirrors.
Ally said nothing. He just sat on the plinth, shirtless, his breathing now even but shallow, watching her with an unreadable expression.
She fetched the roll of rigid zinc oxide tape, the sharp, medicinal scent hitting her nostrils. She pulled a stool over and sat in front of him, her knees almost brushing his. The mirrors on either wall reflected infinite versions of the scene: a petite, dark-haired girl in a white coat, poised before a bruised athlete, caught in a loop of anticipation.
“The objective is to limit scapular protraction and provide a tactile reminder against overhead movement,” she recited, her voice hollow in the large room. “It should be supportive, not restrictive.”
“Just don’t mummify me,” Ally said, a flicker of his old tone returning. “I’ve got a date with a microwave meal later. Need to be able to lift the fork.”
A faint, nervous smile touched her lips. It faded as she tore the first strip with a loud riiiip. The sound was final, like tearing a bandage off the quiet of the room.
“Posture,” Hammy instructed from behind her, a disembodied voice. “Sit up straight, MacLeod. Let her work.”
Ally adjusted, squaring his shoulders, and immediately winced. The movement pulled at the bruised tissue. Roz saw the flinch, a minute tremor that ran through the muscles of his chest. Her own hands felt clumsy, alien.
“Anchor strip first,” she murmured to herself. She placed the end of the tape just below his pectoral muscle, on the left side of his ribcage. Her fingertips pressed into the warm skin, finding the solid rib beneath. She was clinical, deliberate. She smoothed the tape down, her palm flattening it against his side. The contrast was jarring—the cool, dead-white adhesive against the living, marked warmth of him.
She reached around his back with the roll, her arm brushing against his bare skin. She had to lean in, her head close to his chest. She could hear his heartbeat again, steady but fast. She could smell the clean sweat from the exertion of the strength test, mixed with the antiseptic gel. It was overwhelmingly human.
“Keep it taut, but not tight,” Hammy droned. “You’re building a scaffold, not a straitjacket.”
She guided the tape around his back, under his arm, and back to the front, creating a foundational loop. Her world shrank to the span of her hands, the texture of the tape, the geography of his injury. The purple and yellow bloom seemed to pulse under her attention.
The second strip overlapped the first. She was closer now, her focus absolute. She applied pressure, her fingers smoothing, adhering. He was utterly still, a statue of passive compliance. But in the mirror, she saw his eyes were closed. His jaw was tight.
The third strip was higher, aiming to cup the bottom of his scapula. She had to get the angle right. She positioned the start, then leaned in again to pull it across his back. This time, as she stretched the tape, her forearm pressed flush against the muscles of his back. She felt him inhale sharply.
“Sorry,” she whispered, automatically.
“S’okay,” he breathed out.
She finished the anchor, tearing the tape. The process was methodical, rhythmic: the rip, the placement, the smoothing, the heat of skin under her palms. She began the supportive cross-strips, creating a web of white over the bruise. With each new strip, her initial nervousness began to transmute into a hyper-focused precision. This was a problem she could solve. A structure she could build. She lost herself in the geometry of support.
She pulled a particularly long strip taut from his sternum, around his back, with more force than she’d used on the others. She was trying to achieve perfect tension.
“Christ,” Ally grunted, the word punched out of him.
She froze. Her hands stilled on his skin.
“Not so tight,” he said, his voice strained. “You’re… you’re crushing my ribs.”
She looked down at her work. She had pulled the tape so rigidly it was blanching the skin at its edges, creating a deep, constricting valley across his torso. In her quest for perfect support, she had cinched it like a vice. She wasn't just binding the injury. She was binding him, the rise and fall of his breath, the expansion of his lungs.
In the mirror, she saw her own face—wide-eyed, startled by her own intensity.
“Ease off, Reid,” Hammy said, not unkindly. “It’s not a tourniquet. The aim is to remind, not to punish.”
Her fingers fumbled, suddenly useless. She tried to peel back the corner of the offending strip, but the adhesive held fast. “I’m sorry. I… I can redo it.”
“Just loosen it,” Ally said. He brought his right hand up, his fingers covering hers on the tape. His touch was warm, grounding. “Here. You have to lift and release, don’t just pull.”
Together, their fingers worked at the edge. He guided her, applying upward pressure to break the seal without tearing his skin. She watched their hands, his large and capable, hers small and currently inept. The intimacy of the correction was far greater than the clinical application. This was collaboration, not procedure.
“Better,” he said, as the tape relaxed a fraction. He took a deeper, experimental breath. “See? Room for dinner.”
She let out a shaky breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. She finished the last few strips with a lighter, more mindful touch. The final piece was a horizontal anchor across the top. As she smoothed it down over his collarbone, her pinky finger brushed the sensitive hollow at the base of his throat. He swallowed. She snatched her hand back as if burned.
“Done,” she announced, her voice too bright.
Hammy stepped forward, inspecting her work. He prodded at the edges, tested the give. “A bit of a rocky start, but the finished product is adequate. Functional.” He gave a curt nod. “Right. MacLeod, you’re free to go. Light mobility only. Use the bike. Reid, with me.”
Ally reached for his t-shirt, maneuvering it carefully over the new latticework of tape. He moved with a newfound stiffness, the rigid structure altering his gait. He gave Roz a last, fleeting glance—a complex mix of gratitude, discomfort, and something else she couldn’t name—before nodding to Hammy and leaving the lab.
The door sighed shut behind him.
Hammy busied himself wiping down the plinth. “You got lost in the technique,” he said, without looking at her. “Forgot the patient was a person. Happens. Especially when the person is… distracting.”
She began cleaning up the tape scraps, her cheeks flaming. “I just wanted to get it right.”
“Aye. I know.” He tossed the cloth into a bin. “But ‘right’ in medicine is a range, not a point. Too loose is useless. Too tight is harmful. The art is finding the space in between where healing actually happens. It’s a dynamic thing. Like them.” He jerked his head towards the pitch outside. “All force and counter-force. You have to feel it, not just calculate it.”
He looked at her then, his gaze shrewd. “You’re a brilliant calculator, Reid. But this job, if you wanted it, would require you to be more. Good thing you don’t, eh?” He offered a wry, almost paternal smile. “Go on. Get out of here. Your two weeks are nearly up. Go study for your real exams.”
She walked out of the stadium, the spring air feeling alien after the sealed environment of the lab. The ghost of the tape’s tension lingered in her fingers. You’re crushing my ribs. He’d been talking about the physical constraint. But the look in his eyes had spoken of a different, deeper confinement.
She didn’t go back to her flat. She walked, aimlessly, through the bustling streets, until her feet carried her to the university library. It was her sanctuary, a cathedral of quiet calculation. She found a carrel in a secluded corner, surrounded by the familiar, comforting smell of old paper and dust.
She pulled out her pathophysiology textbook, intent on losing herself in the predictable patterns of disease. But the words swam on the page. All she could see was the map of his bruise, the white lines of her tape over it, a failed attempt to impose order on chaos.
A soft thump broke her concentration. A book landed on the table beside her, followed by the familiar, subtle scent of soap and clean cotton.
Ally stood there, a worn copy of The Once and Future King in his hand. He wore a loose hoodie now, the bulk of it hiding the tape job. He looked out of place among the silent scholars, like a lion in a reading room.
“Hammy said light mobility,” he said, his voice low, mindful of the quiet. “He didn’t specify the type. Mental mobility counts, right?”
She stared, speechless.
He slid into the chair opposite her. “I come here sometimes. To think. Or not to think. It’s quiet. Nobody looks for a rugby player in the History of Art stacks.”
“How did you find me?” she managed to ask.
“Lucky guess. You seem like a library person.” He opened his book, but didn’t look at it. His eyes were on her, calm and direct. “You okay?”
“I should be asking you that. I almost taped you into respiratory arrest.”
A genuine smile, the first she’d seen since the injury, touched his mouth. It transformed his tired face. “It was a good lesson. For both of us. I learned I don’t like being trussed up. You learned… something about tension, I suppose.”
She looked down at her textbook. “Hammy says I calculate. That I don’t feel the range.”
“Hammy’s a smart man.” Ally leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. The hoodie sleeve rode up, revealing the edge of the white tape at his wrist. “But he’s wrong about one thing. You do feel it. You just don’t trust it yet. That’s why you clamp down. It’s safer to have a rule, a tight measurement, than to live in the messy in-between.”
His words echoed in the silent space, more profound than any text. He saw her. Not just the student, not just the medic, but the mechanism of fear behind her precision.
“Why are you here, Ally?” she asked, the question barely a whisper.
He was silent for a long moment, tracing a finger along a line of text in his book. “Because in that lab, with all the mirrors, it felt like being watched by a thousand eyes. But yours were the only ones that mattered. And when you were taping me… it was the most seen I’ve felt in months. Even if you were trying to turn me into a statue.”
Outside, the sky darkened, promising rain. In the library carrel, surrounded by silent stories, they sat in a new kind of quiet. Not the quiet of assessment, or of pain, but of a shared, unmapped territory. The tension was still there, thrumming between them, but it had changed. It was no longer a thing to be measured or taped down.
It was simply a fact. A living, breathing thing in the space between their shared silence.
The silence stretched, but it wasn’t empty. It was filled with the rustle of a page turning, the distant scrape of a chair, the sound of his steady breathing across the table. Roz watched his hand, the one tracing the book’s spine. The knuckles were scarred, the fingers thick, but his touch on the paper was delicate.
“This doesn’t feel like light mobility,” she finally said, her voice a thread in the hushed space.
“It’s the heaviest kind,” he replied, not looking up. “Thinking about everything I can’t do on that pitch. This is lighter. Here, I can just be a guy in a library. A guy who probably shouldn’t have leaned into that tackle.”
“Probably not.” She closed her textbook, surrendering. The calculated pathways of disease felt irrelevant now. “Does it hurt? Right now, I mean.”
He considered it, rotating his taped shoulder slightly under the hoodie. A faint crinkling sound whispered from beneath the fabric. “A dull ache. A reminder. It’s not the worst thing.” He looked at her then, his eyes the colour of a peat-stained loch. “The worst thing is the noise in my head. The commentary. ‘You’re fragile now. You’ll lose your spot. This silence is what retirement feels like.’ Taping that up is harder.”
She understood that. The mental pathophysiology of injury was never covered in lectures. “What do you do? To quiet it?”
“I come here. I read about doomed kings and questing beasts. It’s all grand tragedy and failed glory. Puts my own little drama in perspective.” He gave a soft, self-deprecating laugh. “Or I try to write. Bad poetry. Even worse songs on the guitar. It’s embarrassingly cliché, the jock with the secret guitar.”
“It’s not cliché,” she said, too quickly. “It’s just… human.”
He held her gaze, and the noise of the library seemed to recede. The fluorescent hum faded. There was just the dust motes dancing in the slanted light from the window, and the solid reality of him across the table.
“You’re different, Roz,” he said. His voice was low, stripped of all performance. “Everyone else treats me like I’m made of glass now, or like I’m a project to be fixed. The medics see a chart. The coaches see a liability. The lads just get awkward, don’t know what to say. You…” He paused, searching for the word. “You saw a problem you wanted to solve. And then, when you realized you were solving it wrong, you panicked. Not because your grade was on the line, but because you might have hurt me.”
Her throat tightened. She remembered the feel of the tape, how rigid it had gone under her hands. Crushing my ribs.
“I did hurt you.”
“For a second. And then you fixed it.” He leaned forward again, the old wood of the table groaning softly. “That’s the in-between, isn’t it? The space Hammy was on about. The place where mistakes aren’t catastrophic. They’re just… information.”
He glanced down at his book, then back at her, as if steeling himself. The easy charm was completely gone, replaced by a raw, unfamiliar hesitation. He swallowed.
“You’ve got two weeks left then I’m no longer your patient.” The words came out in a quiet rush. “I could take you for a drink? If you want. Think about it. I won’t bother you again for two whole weeks, I promise.”
The air left her lungs. It was a question, but it felt like a threshold. A line drawn. On one side, the safe, defined world of clinician and patient, of rules and calculations. On the other, this unknown territory with its dim lighting and unpredictable weather. His eyes were steady, waiting, offering no pressure, just a simple, terrifying possibility.
The silence returned, but now it was charged, electric. Every second that ticked by was an answer in itself. She could feel the ghost of the tape on her fingertips, the memory of his guided hands over hers. You have to lift and release. This felt like that. A lifting, a releasing of a different kind of tension.
Outside, the first fat raindrops hit the library window, tracing slow, meandering paths down the glass.
Outside, the first fat raindrops hit the library window, tracing slow, meandering paths down the glass. The sound was a soft percussion against the silence between them. Roz watched the water distort the world outside, buying a second to let her heart slow its frantic rhythm.
His question hung there, simple and enormous. A drink. Not a date, just a drink. The clinical distance she’d wrapped around herself like a coat was slipping, revealing the ordinary, terrifying possibility beneath. She could say no. It was the safe, smart, calculated answer. She opened her mouth, but no sound came out. Her eyes flicked from the rain to his face, to the scar on his brow, to the careful hope in his expression.
“You don’t have to answer now,” he said, his voice gentler. He looked down at his own hands, turning them over as if inspecting for new damage. “The two-week embargo stands. No pressure. Just… the offer’s there.”
“I know,” she finally whispered. The words felt inadequate. She wanted to explain the static in her head, the fear of crossing a line she’d drawn so thickly in her own mind. “It’s just… the rules.”
“The rules are for your placement,” he said. “Which ends. Then the rules are just… people. Having a drink.” He gave a small, almost imperceptible shrug with his good shoulder. The tape beneath his hoodie crinkled again, a reminder of the failed architecture she’d built on him. “Forget it. It was a daft idea.”
“It’s not daft.” The correction leapt from her, surprising them both. She took a breath, trying to mold her thoughts into something coherent. “I’m just not… I’m not good at this. The in-between. I like knowing the procedure.”
A genuine smile touched his eyes this time, warming them. “Me too. That’s why I like the pitch. Clear rules. Clear objectives. This,” he gestured vaguely between them, “is all broken field running. No set plays.”
Her own smile felt wobbly, unfamiliar on her face. She was about to speak, to maybe say yes, to maybe ask what kind of drink, when a sharp, insistent buzz shattered the moment. It vibrated against the wooden table, loud and industrial.
Ally flinched. He pulled his phone from his hoodie pocket, the screen illuminating his face with a harsh blue glow. He stared at it, his expression tightening, the ease of a moment before draining away. His thumb swiped across the screen and he held it to his ear.
“Yeah?” He listened, his free hand curling into a loose fist on the table. “Now? Right. Yeah, I’m on my way.”
He ended the call and stood up abruptly, the chair legs screeching against the floor. A few students at distant tables glanced over, annoyed. He shoved his book into his bag, movements stiff and hurried. The careful vulnerability was gone, replaced by a clipped, focused energy. The player summoned.
“Right, I need to go,” he said, not looking at her. He slung his bag over his good shoulder, wincing as the strap settled. His gaze finally met hers, but it was already distant, pulled to some other obligation. “See you around.”
And then he was walking away, a large, taped-up figure moving swiftly between the towering bookshelves. He didn’t look back. The space he left behind felt colder, charged with the abruptness of his exit. The echo of his offer still vibrated in the air, now tangled with the harsh buzz of the phone and the finality of his departure.
Roz sat perfectly still. The rain sheeted down the window now, blurring everything into grey and green smears. See you around. Not a promise. Not a plan. Just an acknowledgement that their orbits might cross again, by chance, in the clinical light of the physio lab. She looked down at her pathophysiology textbook, its pages dense with certainty. She placed her palm flat on the cool, smooth cover, trying to steady the strange, unmoored feeling in her chest.
It felt like losing a vital sign on a monitor. A flatline after a sudden, alarming spike.