She pokes at my brother’s insulin kit sitting on the coffee table, her expression shifting to concern. “Are you a diabetic?”

“No, my brother is.” I wish he’d put that stuff away, but it’s always lying somewhere: coffee table, kitchen counter, bathroom. I ended up getting him a spare, which I keep in my medicine cabinet on the not-so-off chance that he can’t find his.

“Type one or two?”

“One.” I don’t love talking about my brother’s health issues, mostly because they seem to stress me out more than they do him.

“Is that why he doesn’t have a license?” Stevie picks an olive off her pizza and pops it in her mouth.

“Pretty much, yeah.” He had a license, but he’s had too many visits to the hospital in the past year for unregulated insulin issues, and they took it away. He has to be clear for a year before he gets it back. His vision isn’t great, either, which is another strike against him.

“That happened to my dad too.”

“Your dad’s a diabetic?”

“Was. He passed away from complications a while back.”

“Shit. I’m sorry.”

“Thanks. Me too.” She stuffs the last of her pizza slice into her mouth.

I want to ask her more questions, like what kind of complications and what happened for him to lose his license, but she bounces up off the couch like she has springs in her ass and plasters on a huge, very fake smile. “Enough about that. Let’s get this party started.” She gives me her back as she rolls out the yoga mat.

I stare at her ass and ponder the layers of her personality. She’s sarcastic and bitchy, she’s sweet and helpful, but I think she’s also got some broken pieces she tries to hide behind all the other parts. She’s the younger sister of an NHL player, her dad passed away, and she’s living in her brother’s unused penthouse for reasons I’m unsure of, other than it’s rent-free.

“All right, grumpy pants, let’s see how stiff you are today.”

Lying down on the floor isn’t easy, and Stevie promises to bring her portable massage table tomorrow. She starts off the same way the team physiotherapist did this morning, checking to see how far I can raise and bend my legs and at what point the pain goes from a dull ache to a vicious throb.

It’s pretty miserable, but even though she’s causing me pain, I don’t absolutely hate having her hands on me.

The range-of-motion shit feels horrible, as do the stretches, but it’s nothing compared to when she starts palpating the muscles around the injury site, checking for tightness. She’s good at finding the worst spots and working on them until they loosen up, but I’m tense, and every touch sends violent pain shooting through my groin.

Stevie sits on the floor beside me and shifts, positioning one of her legs under my injured one. It’s meant to take the pressure off so none of my muscles will be doing the work. She presses her fingertips gently along the edges of the bruising, starting at the inside of my knee.

It doesn’t feel good, but my body seems to be reacting to the physical contact in a way that’s going to become a different kind of painful if I can’t get a handle on it. I pull up the same images from The Shining again and then Charlize Theron when she was a murderer in Monster, because rotting corpses and female serial killers should help prevent my dick from reacting in ways I would prefer it wouldn’t.

But Stevie’s boob is pressed against the outside of my thigh, and her long, pale-blue ponytail tickles my skin, and her fingers keep moving higher, so my control starts to slip.

“You need to stop.”

“Am I causing you a lot of pain?” Stevie flattens her palm against my inner thigh, which doesn’t help at all.

“There’s too much contact. Too much of your skin on my skin. It’s distracting. Can’t you cover up?” And I’m back to being the asshole again. Not that I ever really stopped.

“What?”

I motion to her outfit. “Are you trying to taunt me? Is that what this is about?”

She frowns, and her nose wrinkles. It’s almost cute, which is not good. I can’t be thinking about her in terms like cute.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

I flail a hand toward her. “You. This. The half nakedness.”

“You’re in a pair of underwear.”

Okay, she has a valid point. “You showed up unannounced.”

“Well, I don’t have your phone number, so how else would you propose I contact you? And it wasn’t like you didn’t have plenty of opportunity to cover yourself up. And why is this even an issue? What does it have to do with your level of pain?”

“You’re making me hard!” I snap.

She blinks a few times, and her eyes dart down to my crotch. It’s pretty damn obvious I’m sporting a semi. “How is that my fault?”

“I can feel your boobs on my legs, and your hands are near my dick. It’s not like I have control over it.”

“Well, maybe next time you should rub one out before we do this so you don’t embarrass yourself.”

“You think I haven’t tried? It feels like someone is stabbing me in the balls with a rusty steak knife.”

Stevie huffs and throws her hands in the air. “What do you want me to do? Stop? It’s not like it’s any skin off my back if I don’t help you.”

She starts to move away, but I grab her wrist. “Wait. Just . . . maybe you could put on a sweatshirt or something? There are bound to be a couple clean ones in the laundry room. Please?”

She rolls her eyes. “Fine. But don’t get pissy with me because you can’t control your body parts.”

She comes back a minute later wearing one of my hoodies from college. It really doesn’t help. It’s still a lot of physical contact, and now the sweet smell of her lotion mixes with my laundry, so it’s like she’s wrapped in me. “Can you talk, please?”

“About what?”

“Anything. Why’d you move to Seattle?”

“My ex-boyfriend got a job here, and so did I.”

That doesn’t make a lot of sense. “Why would you want to move where your ex lives?”

“Because he wasn’t my ex until I moved here.” Her voice is somehow softer and harder at the same time.

I’m trying to piece this all together with half my brain functioning thanks to the pain in my groin and my inability to stop focusing on how nice it is to have an attractive woman touching me, even if it’s supposed to be in a professional capacity. “But you’ve only been here for what, a handful of weeks?”

“Yup.” Her expression remains purposefully neutral.

“I don’t get it.”

“We were supposed to move in together. He came out a couple of months early to get settled into the apartment and start his job. I flew in a couple of days earlier than I planned to so we could be together for my birthday, and he was already celebrating.”

I feel like I’m missing some important detail here. “What does that mean, that he was ‘already celebrating’?”

“It means I walked in on him screwing someone who wasn’t me, on my birthday.”

This guy is clearly a brain-dead idiot. “What a dickhead. This guy must be a special kind of stupid to pull something like that.”