Since I was a kid, making it into the World Hockey League was the ultimate goal. No relationship could match my first love, and after my rough childhood, I wasn't putting my heart on the line.
When Bellerive makes a successful bid to move the Califo...
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Part of me regrets insisting that Sawyer be seen by Doctor Bennett two weeks ago after she got drunker than a skunk, although it did confirm she was healing from a low-grade concussion.
Since then, without directly saying it, she's been reestablishing that we're in a service provider and client relationship. Not frosty, but her demeanor is sure as shit not friendly.
Which would normally suit me just fine. I don't need any more friends, and I don't need the complication of any other type of relationship. She's with me to do a job, and my job is the only thing I care about on this island.
Except, it kind of pisses me off that she can brush off the connection we were clearly developing as though it was nothing more than an inconvenience. It annoys me that I want to know her.
Even with Doctor Bennett, she was so vague on how she hit her head that it definitely felt like she was hiding something. I can only assume the way she hurt herself embarrassed her, since she told me about the fall off the horse readily enough.
But her childhood fall is the last confession she's given me, and I'm starting to wonder if it'll be the only one I ever get.
If she wasn't absolutely pushing my physical skills into beast mode, I'd be a lot more mad about her indifference to me personally. At least professionally, she's been more focused, more confident in herself since her drunken night out. When she plans a session, schedules my body maintenance like ice baths and massages, or suggests I increase some aspect of my training, she goes through her thinking in detail with charts and graphs and other players stats and what she knows about other training philosophies as comparisons.
With Joe, he trained me, but he didn't teach me. I did what he wanted me to do, and I never pushed back unless my on-ice performance suffered. Before Sawyer, I didn't realize that I was missing the "why" a lot of the time and the sense of the bigger picture.
"You're coming to the game tonight?" I ask from the huge ice bath that's in a glassed off room next to her front desk. I can see her, but I have to speak loudly to be heard. Normally, we train at the Tucker-Summerset Center, but with our first pre-season game tonight, Sawyer thought it might be easier to focus here.
"I think all of Bellerive will be there," she says.
That's not the clear answer I'm looking for, and I'm about to call her on it when the bell on her front door goes off. She rises from behind her desk, obviously not expecting someone, a frown marring her face.
"Logan here?" a familiar male voice that I wished was less familiar asks.
She gestures toward me, and her father comes into view. "Now isn't really a great time," she says.
"I can talk to him in there," Jonathan steps around her and comes to the door of the ice bath room. "Just wanted to make sure you were ready for tonight."
