Breeding My Stepsister on the Ice novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Day One

Dunne humiliates Lainey on her first day of his clerkship, she finds Tate's chart calling the tear a mild strain, and his blood results show his body has nearly stopped working on its own.

Tate didn't answer him.

I did.

"The team doctor."

The radiologist looked at the screen again, then at Tate's shoulder.

"How many times?"

"Six this season," Tate said. "Maybe seven."

"Get it fixed," the radiologist said. "Soon. And stop letting anybody put a needle in it."

He printed the report and handed it to me, not Tate.

Out in the truck, Tate read it twice.

Then he folded it into his coat pocket and didn't say a word all the way home.

Monday at six-thirty I stood in the Ironmen's training facility in navy scrubs with my student badge clipped to the collar.

The sports-medicine clerkship met in a glass conference room above the practice rink.

Four residents. Two other students. Coffee in paper cups.

Dr. Alan Dunne walked in with his white coat open over a team quarter-zip, smiling.

"Good morning. Welcome to the best rotation in the building."

The residents laughed on cue.

His eyes found me.

"And we have a celebrity. Miss Molloy pulled a player off the bench Saturday night in front of four cameras."

Every head turned to me.

"I've seen the clip," said a resident with very straight teeth. "Nice hoodie."

"Miss Molloy has decided she knows more about my patients than I do," Dunne said. "So here's a lesson for everybody. In this building, the team physician makes the calls. Students observe."

He held out a clipboard.

"Supply closet, second floor. I want every package of gauze counted by size."

"All of it?"

"All of it. Accuracy matters. You'll learn that."

The straight-teeth resident grinned into his coffee.

I took the clipboard.

There were four hundred and twelve packages of four-by-four gauze.

I counted them all.

At ten, the clinic coordinator sent me down to the exam rooms to restock.

The workstation in room three was still logged in under Dunne's name.

I knew I shouldn't.

I did it anyway, standing, with the door open and the gauze in my arms.

Haverly, Tate. Right shoulder.

Diagnosis: mild strain.

Below that, a list of dates. Six injections since November. The last two six days apart.

No imaging ordered. Not once.

Under medications, a separate line.

Testosterone, two hundred milligrams, every week. Started in October. Ordered by Dunne. A note beside it in his initials: Per GM. Recovery protocol.

Per GM.

Per Doug.

I heard voices in the hall and closed the screen.

My hands were steady. My stomach wasn't.

At lunch Gemma met me in the cafeteria on the medical school side with two trays and a look.

"You smell like a supply closet."

"I counted four hundred and twelve packages of gauze."

"Did he ask you to alphabetize them?"

"He asked for size."

"Monster." She pushed a cup of soup at me. "Eat. You look like a ghost in scrubs."

I told her about the chart. Mild strain. Six shots. Per GM.

She put her spoon down.

"That's not a strain. That's a pattern."

"I know."

"You looked at his chart."

"It was open."

"Lainey." She leaned in. "If Dunne finds out you read a chart you weren't assigned, that's his whole case against you in one sentence."

"He's my stepbrother."

"That makes it worse, babe, not better."

I stabbed a crouton.

"What's the forearm situation, by the way?" she said. "For morale."

"Gemma."

"Big? Veiny? I've only seen him on TV. The TV adds ten pounds of forearm."

"He's six foot four and he can't lift a coffee pot."

That shut her up for a second.

Then she squeezed my wrist over my old watch.

"Okay. What do you need?"

"The outside center drew his blood yesterday too. Hormone panel. Results should hit today."

"Then we wait." She stole one of my crackers. "And you keep your face very boring this afternoon."

I kept my face boring.

At three Dunne ran rounds on the players who'd been checked that week.

He stood at the head of the group in the hallway outside the weight room, reading from a tablet.

"Haverly," he said. "Right shoulder. Mild strain. He was cleared to play. He was pulled by someone with no credentials."

He didn't look at me. Everyone else did.

"He'll be back on the ice Thursday," Dunne said. "We'll manage the pain."

"With what?" I said.

The residents went quiet.

Dunne smiled.

"With medicine, Miss Molloy. You'll get to that in the second half of medical school."

The straight-teeth resident laughed out loud.

My phone buzzed in my scrub pocket.

Then it buzzed again.

The outside center's portal. New results. Haverly, Tate.

I shouldn't have looked during rounds.

I looked.

The numbers sat in a little column, each with its normal range beside it.

His testosterone was sky high.

Under it were the two hormones the brain sends down to tell a man's body to make its own. The signal.

Both were flagged in red.

Both were so low the lab had printed the same word next to them.

Undetectable.

His body had stopped trying.

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