Page 61 of The Goalie in Room 1

“While I’m naked.”

“Well, that is how showers work. Generally.”

A faint smile pulled at my mouth. “Generally.” When he didn’t say anything further, I asked, “You offering to get me naked, Doc?”

“No. I’m offering to help you shower safely,” he clarified. “That is not the same thing.”

“Right,” I said.

“You can wait, clean up with washcloths, or let me help you. Those are your choices.”

My eyes narrowed. “I hate when you do that.”

“Give you reasonable options?”

“Make all of them sound reasonable when only one gets me what I want.”

“It’s an important medical skill.”

“Yeah, I know. All the other surgeons used it as well. Just not as well as you do. I bet there’s a whole fucking class to train you fuckers how to do it.” I sighed and looked toward the bathroom. I hated vulnerability. I hated that the first time he’d see me naked, that our first shower together, would be clinical instead of sexual. “Fine.”

“Fine, what?”

I pushed carefully to my feet and grabbed my crutches, refusing to sit in my filth for a moment longer. “You can help me.”

The bathroom’s centerpiece was a large open shower with a built-in bench that ran the length of the back wall, double shower heads with two handheld sprayers, and a slip-resistant floor. I knew all this because I’d been eyeing the thing for two damn days. Every trip to the bathroom made me hanker for a shower more than the previous one, but I knew better to ask until the seventy-two-hour mark.

The wide, spacious room even held a stool. One I sat on while Thad puttered nervously around the bathroom. He stacked clean towels and moved all the hygiene items to within reach. When he turned, he took a deep breath, his brow pinched.

“You okay?”

“Fantastic.”

“Dizzy? Nauseated? Any pain?”

“No. No. And yes, there’s pain. I mean, a doctor did just drill a hole in the end of my femur and then hammered dead-guy bone into it. So, I think pain is to be expected for a while.”

He shook his head as he helped me into the shower. Thad knelt in front of me. The joke about him being on his knees for me died when he looked up and said, “Technically, it was two holes.”

The laugh that began in my throat died a sudden death when his hands gripped my athletic shorts. His molten brown eyes met mine, robbing me of breath. Under the shorts, I was naked as the day I was born, and I didn’t know if I could remain unaffected when he pulled them off.

“Cash, are you⁠—”

“I’m sure,” I said, pushing the shorts down under my ass. I sat on the edge of the bench and pulled my left leg out of my shorts.

My shirt hung low enough to cover the softness between my legs that suddenly embarrassed me. I’d worried that getting hard while Thad undressed me would be humiliating. In reality, it was the fact that I didn’t—not even a little—that mortified me.

Thad worked the shorts down my leg, helped me move so my leg stretched out along the bench, and then released the brace wrapped around my leg. The sound of those latches opening made my entire body go tense. He’d only opened the brace twice—once when he put the cold-therapy wrap on and a second time when I had an itch and threatened to unlock it myself to scratch it. Both times, I was sitting in a space—the bed or the couch—where I felt safe.

“Cash, the bench is wide enough for you to fully lie down. As long as you stay put…” he said as if he knew what thoughts raced through my mind.

“I know.”

Thad eased the brace out from underneath my leg and removed all the wrappings and bandages, leaving only the Steri-Strips. Without them, my leg looked vulnerable and grotesque with how swollen and bruised it was.

“It looks worse than it is,” he said, making quick work of covering the strips with what looked like the same shit my tattoo artist used over my tattoos.

It actually didn’t look as bad as it had after the accident or the first surgery. Or even the second and third surgeries. But it still felt off. And a bit numb. “It looks and feels like it belongs to someone else.”