I haven’t had a steady enough hand. The pain in my back is so sharp, my hand shakes when I’ve tried. But I don’t tell him that. Instead, I say, “Haven’t felt like it.”
He leans a little closer, presses his nose to my hair. “You need a shower, too.”
Also, equally daunting, when my legs and back have hurt so bad, I haven’t felt confident I could handle the agony caused by movement necessary to wash myself. I’ve been worried that I’d black out from it and knock my head.
I shrug, which, of fucking course, hurts.
“Good thing I’m here,” he says.
I glare up at him. “Fuck. No.”
He smiles, glides his hands through my filthy hair. A groan rolls out of me. Damn, that feels good. “You sure about that?” he says. “I could wash your hair for you. Give you a fresh shave. Change those stinky sheets on your bed.”
A moan sneaks out before I can bite it back and instead say something cutting, cold, anything to push him away.
“Just imagine,” he says, still massaging my scalp. “Cool, crisp sheets. Your skin smelling like soap instead of sweat. No prickly scruff on your neck. Your hair wet and clean.”
“Shit,” I groan.
His smile widens. “Better than dirty talk, isn’t it?”
“Go away,” I beg.
He smooths back my hair, which clings to my sweaty forehead. I glare at him, hating how exposed I feel, how defenseless I am—sensation, pain, need, fear, flooding me, overwhelming me. I don’t want him to see me like this. And yet he has. He’s here still. He’s not gone.
But he will be, that warning voice whispers.
He shakes his head. “You’re so darn hypocritical.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“You held me, rounded up the team to shield me after I was verbally harassed, while I had a panic attack in front of 25,000 people.”
“I should have knocked his fucking lights out,” I growl, hating the memory, seeing it again, the word leaving that piece of shit, then hitting its mark with Oliver, whose eyes widened, then dimmed.
I long ago learned to harden myself against people’s bigotry, the disapproving looks and homophobic comments, sometimes in other languages that weren’t hard to translate. I got stronger, bigger, more intimidating, until most people were too scared to insult me, at least to my face. I built my walls higher, made myself colder, froze them out until I felt nothing when ignorant words came my way.
But that’s not who Oliver is, no chilly detachment, no thick skin or sky-high boundaries, nothing shielding his heart when that word struck its blow. I wanted to disembowel that piece of queerphobic shit for putting a stricken look on Oliver’s face.
“Hayes.”
“Hmm?”
Oliver slips his finger down my forehead, my nose, tracing my mouth. “I didn’t mean for you to go down crappy memory lane. My point is you helped me. You took care of me. Now, I’m going to help and take care of you.”
“The fuck you are.” I stare at him, a knot in my throat. Angry. Relieved. Scared. “I don’t have an easy way to get clean,” I admit. “Don’t like baths, so no tubs. No bench in my shower, either. I never thought…”
I never thought I’d need a shower with a bench. Because I’ve been living in fucking denial. How else did I think it would end? I always knew I wouldn’t walk off the pitch for the last time. I knew nothing could tear me away from this game other than my body being rendered irrevocably unfit to return to it.
“I don’t know how to do it,” I finally manage.
Oliver searches my eyes, before an easy smile returns. “Well, then you are in luck, my friend. Because I have a shower chair. I’ll go grab it and bring it right over.”
“Why do you have that?”
“My dad had most of his leg amputated and uses a prosthetic limb; he finds it much easier to sit while showering. My soon-to-be sister-in-law has rheumatoid arthritis, uses a cane for stability, so I made the leap that she’d value that option, too. They both live close; the chances that they’d need my shower are slim, but I didn’t want them to ever be here and need a rinse-off and for that basic function of my bathroom to be inaccessible to them.” He shrugs. “It’s not hard to keep a shower chair in my closet, ready for when they might need it, or hell, when I might need it. Statistically, it’s only a matter of time until I bust something and need the thing myself. When I’ve saved up enough, I’m gonna redo that shower, build a bench, but for now, this is what I’ve got.”
Not that I’m surprised by this confession, knowing what an obscenely considerate, kind person Oliver is, but it makes a difference, hearing it from him, anyway—that he’s grown up loving and admiring someone whose body knows pain and hardship, that not only his own flesh and blood, but the woman his brother loves struggles with pain and mobility, and it’s so…fucking natural to him to see them, to consider them.
To love them.
Maybe it’s because I’m so damn desperate to feel clean. Maybe it’s because I’m lonely and in so much pain, I can barely think about anything besides that. But rather than tell him to fuck off and, with what strength I have left, not so politely shove his ass out of my house, I hold Oliver’s eyes and tell him, “All right.”
“Fuck. Shit. Fucking shit,” I growl as I ease onto the shower chair and set the hand towel that Oliver left draped on it across my lap for modesty’s sake.
“How’s it going?” he asks on the other side of the door.
“Fucking peachy,” I call.
“All clear?”
“I’m decent if that’s what you mean.” I peer down at the towel. “Well, decent-ish.”
The bathroom door whips open. Through the fogged-up glass, Oliver is visible, walking in, wearing the shortest, tightest pair of swim trunks I have ever seen.
And of fucking course, they’re the most heinously vibrant multicolored floral print.
“I know,” he says, stepping in, sliding the shower door behind him. “They look amazing on me.”
I shake my head as he steps closer, inspecting the bottles, finding the shampoo and squirting it into his palm. “You did it just to torture me,” I tell him. “I have to sit here literally at eye level with—” I make the mistake of glancing where my eyes land on his groin and swallow roughly.
Oliver’s got a flush to his cheeks as he starts lathering shampoo into my hair. “Well, then I guess you’ll just have to shut your eyes and focus on relaxing if you can’t appreciate the beauty of my psychedelic hibiscus swim trunks.”
“The print’s seared into my retinas.” I shut my eyes, tip my head back. “Like fireworks, when you see them on the backs of your eyelids.”
“Man, I love fireworks,” he says. “That boom that just rattles your chest, colors splashing across the sky like a big flick of the cosmic paintbrush.”
I sigh as he steps behind me and scrubs my scalp. He takes his time, deep circular motions with his fingertips, before his touch eases down my scalp to the base of my skull, which throbs with a headache. Next he scrubs near my temples, massaging there, too. Then he detaches the showerhead to rinse it, his hands capable and steady, running through my hair.