Breeding My Stepsister on the Ice novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Guest in This House

Doug takes the vials and warns Lainey she's a guest in his house, Mom asks her to stay out of it, and Lainey pays cash for an outside MRI that shows a full tear someone has been injecting.

I turned the box so the label faced him.

"Tate. Do you know what's in these?"

"Testosterone." He shrugged with his good side. "Helps the tissue heal."

He reached for the box. I kept my hand on it.

"Listen to me like I'm the paramedic, not your stepsister."

"You're both."

"Then listen twice."

He almost smiled.

I kept it plain, the way I used to talk to men on their kitchen floors at three in the morning.

"When you put testosterone in from outside, your brain notices. It stops telling your own body to make any."

"Sounds efficient."

"It also stops telling your body to make sperm."

He blinked at me.

"You can look like a bull and be shooting blanks," I said. "It can come back when you stop. Sometimes it takes years. Sometimes it needs help."

The fridge hummed.

Then he laughed, low, careful of the shoulder.

"I'm thirty-one, Lainey. I've got time."

"You've got a torn shoulder and a box of hormones from a man who won't scan it."

"You don't know it's torn."

"I watched it leave the socket from twenty feet away."

The stairs creaked.

Doug came down in a navy robe with the team logo on the pocket.

He looked at the ice, at the box, at me.

He tucked the box under his arm.

"That's team property," he said.

"It has his name on it."

"It has the team's doctor on it." He smiled at me. "You're a guest in this house, kiddo. A guest doesn't go through a man's bag."

"I went for a towel."

"Alan sits on your promotions committee." He said it gently, the way you'd mention the weather. "He decides who graduates. I'd think about that before you start diagnosing my players."

"Your son."

"My player," Doug said, and went back upstairs with the box.

Tate stared at the counter where it had been.

"He's not wrong about the committee," he said quietly.

"I know."

"So drop it."

"No."

I slept on the couch in the den with my shoes on.

At eight, Mom made eggs.

The twins were already in jerseys, arguing over who got the last of the orange juice.

"Lainey, did you see Tate's shoulder go pop?" my brother asked.

"I did."

"Was it gross?"

"Very."

Mom set a plate in front of me and squeezed my shoulder.

Then she leaned down to my ear.

"Doug told me about last night, honey."

"Did he tell you Dunne shot that joint twice in six days?"

Her hand went still.

"Let the men handle hockey," she said. "Please. For me. It's one season."

I looked at her.

Ten years of let the men handle it.

"Mom, if it's torn and they keep shooting it, he could lose the use of that arm."

"Dr. Dunne is on television every week."

"So is the weather."

Tate came in, hair wet, arm tucked to his ribs.

He kissed Mom on the cheek, stole a piece of toast from my brother, and took the bait when my sister asked him to flex.

He flexed the left.

I watched him wince when he forgot and reached with the right for the coffee pot.

I stood up.

"Get your coat."

Mom said, "Lainey."

Tate looked at me over the coffee pot.

"Where are we going?"

"An imaging center on the south side that doesn't bill the Ironmen."

"It's Sunday."

"They're open. I used to bring them car wrecks."

He put the pot down.

He got his coat.

Mom didn't stop us. She didn't help either.

In his truck I called the center and booked an MRI of the right shoulder.

"Insurance?" the woman asked.

"Cash."

Tate turned his head. "How much?"

"Nine hundred."

"Lainey, no. I make more than that in a period."

"Your insurance goes through the team. The team goes through your dad."

The nine hundred came out of my loan money. That was my rent and two months of groceries.

I didn't tell him that.

At the center, I asked them to draw a hormone panel too.

Tate held out his left arm for the needle without a word.

Then they took him back for the scan, and I sat in a plastic chair under a TV playing cooking shows.

I called Gemma.

"Tell me you're not in a hospital," she said.

"Imaging center. His shoulder."

"Is he hot in a gown?"

"Gemma."

"I'm asking for science."

I put my head back against the wall.

"I just spent my rent on my stepbrother's rotator cuff."

"Then we live on chili all month."

"Doug says Dunne sits on my promotions committee."

Her voice changed.

"He does," she said. "I looked it up last fall when you got the rotation. He's the one who votes on people like us."

"So I'm done."

"You're not done. You're a paramedic who saw a bad joint. That's the job." A pot banged on her end. "Did you eat?"

"Eggs."

"Eat a real lunch. Then call me back and tell me what the scan says."

Forty minutes later a tech waved me through a door.

Tate sat on the edge of a chair in a paper gown, holding his own elbow.

The radiologist was a gray-haired man with reading glasses on a cord. He'd known me when I wore a uniform.

He didn't say hello.

He clicked twice and turned the screen toward Tate.

There was a black gap in the white where the tendon should have met the bone.

"That's a full-thickness tear," he said. "All the way through. The edges have pulled back."

Tate stared at it.

The radiologist took his glasses off.

"Who's been injecting this?"

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