Between sets, they talked. Elise sat on the bench with a water bottle and watched Sienna lean against the squat rack, relaxed and unhurried, as if she had nowhere else to be. Kylie kept the energy up, cracking jokes about players who tried to bench press with injuries and the time Frankie had attempted to do a deadlift in flip-flops. But it was the quieter moments, when Kylie moved away to adjust a cable machine and Elise was resting between sets, that the conversation drifted somewhere warmer.
"How long have you been in Phoenix Ridge?" Elise asked, wiping her face with a towel.
"Fourteen months." Sienna was leaning against the wall beside the squat rack, arms still crossed, her posture relaxed in a way Elise hadn't seen from her before. "I came from the US Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. Before that I was in San Diego, and before that, briefly, in London."
"London?"
"I did a fellowship at a sports medicine clinic in Harley Street. Two years. I loved the city but not the weather." A pause. She tucked the loose strand of hair behind her ear. "Or the food."
Elise took a long drink from her water bottle, watching Sienna over the rim. "What made you come here?"
Sienna's gaze drifted toward the windows, where the practice rink was visible through the glass. Empty now, the ice smooth and white under the overhead lights.
"Phoenix Ridge offered me the head physician role for the Valkyries. It was the PWHL's inaugural season. A chance to build a programme from scratch." She was quiet for a moment. "I'd been working in men's sport for fifteen years. The politics were exhausting. The pay gaps were depressing. And the culture was..." She trailed off, choosing her words. "Resistant to change. The PWHL felt different. It felt like it could matter."
"And has it been?"
Sienna looked back at her. The light from the gym windows caught her glasses and made her eyes hard to read, but her voice was warm when she spoke. "Yes. It has."
Kylie returned with a medicine ball and Elise moved into the core section of the circuit. Kylie demonstrated each exercise with a running commentary that made Elise laugh despite the effort, comparing dead bugs to "what happens when you try to put on trousers after leg day."
Her left shoulder protested at the planks but Sienna was there immediately, adjusting her position so the load transferred away from the injured side. Her hand was on Elise's lower back, correcting her alignment, and the touch was brief and professional and Elise still felt it after Sienna stepped away.
They finished the circuit. Elise was breathing hard, sweat beading along her hairline, her legs shaking from the squats. She felt good. Better than she had in days. The endorphins were cutting through the fog that had followed her since the injury, and her body felt like her own again instead of a thing broken and borrowed.
"Same time tomorrow?" Kylie asked, scribbling notes on her clipboard.
"Same time tomorrow." Elise grabbed her towel and water bottle. Her legs were shaking pleasantly, as they used to after a hard practice, and the endorphins had smoothed the jagged edges of her mood into near-manageability.
Kylie clapped her on the good shoulder. "You did well, Moreno. We'll bump the weight up next week."
Sienna walked with Elise back toward the medical wing, their footsteps echoing in the empty corridor. The facility was quieter now, the morning skate finished, the players scattered to their various commitments. Elise could hear the hum of the ventilation system and the distant sound of someone vacuuming the team lounge.
"Thank you," Elise said. "For coming to the gym. And for all of this. The programme, the coordination with Kylie. You didn't have to do that much."
"It's my job."
Elise tilted her head. "You keep saying that."
Sienna's mouth twitched. "Because it keeps being true."
They stopped at the medical suite door. Sienna had her hand on the handle, ready to go back inside, and Elise stood in the corridor with her gym bag over her right shoulder and her hair sticking to her temples and her pulse loud in her ears.
She had a crush on Sienna Park. That was the simple, stupid truth of it. Not a lightning bolt, just a tide that had been coming in for days without her noticing. Not just the physical awareness, though that was there too, vivid and insistent. It was Sienna listening when Elise talked, fully present, as if nothing else in the building mattered. Coordinating with Kylie before Elise had even asked. Making scrambled eggs without being asked, as if taking care of Elise was what her body did automatically, before her professional brain could object. She had a crush on her team physician. On the woman who examined her shoulder every morning and texted her at midnight and made scrambled eggs in her kitchen and said "you were never a lost cause" in a voice that was too quiet for a doctor talking to a patient.
"See you tomorrow, Doc," Elise said. Her voice came out softer than she'd intended.
"See you tomorrow." Sienna held her gaze a second too long, and the corridor shrank to just the two of them, standing three feet apart with the medical suite door between them and a pull that neither of them acknowledged.
Then Sienna disappeared into Medical and the door swung shut. Elise stood in the corridor, the sweat cooling on her skin. She pressed her hand against her sternum where her heart was beating too fast.
She was in so much trouble.
7
SIENNA
Mara's office was neat in the way a military bunk was neat: everything in its place, nothing personal, nothing soft. A whiteboard covered one wall, dense with formations and line combinations in three colours of marker. The desk held a laptop, a stack of printed stats sheets, and a coffee mug that said COACH on it in block letters, which Sienna suspected had been a gift Mara was too polite to throw away.