Page 11 of Offside for Christmas
Hansen arrived tonight. Checked into his apartment around 8 PM. Heads up: he already asked the front desk manager if PT sessions were mandatory. This one's going to be a challenge. - Coach
Ellie read the email twice, then smiled grimly.
"Good," she said aloud to her empty apartment. "I love a challenge."
She finished her hot chocolate, turned off the fairy lights, and went to bed.
Tomorrow, she'd meet the man who apparently thought physical therapy was optional.
They'd see about that.
3
COLE
Cole pulled into the Eagles' training facility parking lot at 7:52 AM and sat in his truck for three minutes, staring at the building like it might bite him.
He was early. He was never early. Early meant eager, and eager meant he cared. He didn’t.
But something about that email last night—8 AM sharp—had gotten under his skin. The specificity of it. The authority. Like Noelle Winters, PT, DPT, was the kind of person who noticed when you were late and judged you accordingly.
Cole didn't care about being judged. He'd been judged his entire career. But for some reason, he didn't want to give her the satisfaction of being right about him on day one.
At 7:55, he grabbed his gym bag and headed inside.
The facility was smaller than he'd expected but well-maintained. Clean floors, updated equipment, walls covered in team photos going back decades. And Christmas decorations. Everywhere. Garland wrapped around the stair railings. Wreaths on every door. A small tree in the corner of the lobby, lights twinkling cheerfully.
On the front desk, someone had left a thermos with a handwritten label: "Hot Chocolate - Help Yourself!"
Cole scowled at it and kept walking.
The training room was down a short hallway, second door on the right. The door was closed. He checked his phone: 7:57. Close enough.
He knocked once and pushed it open.
The room was smaller than Chicago's training facility—everything here was smaller than Chicago—but organized with the kind of precision that suggested someone who took their job very seriously. PT table in the center, resistance bands hung by color on the wall, foam rollers stacked neatly in a bin, a desk in the corner with a laptop and what looked like patient files arranged in labeled folders.
More Christmas decorations. A small tree on the desk. Candy canes in a bowl shaped like a sleigh. String lights wrapped around the window frame.
And it wasn't just decorations. Someone had set up a small speaker that was playing instrumental Christmas music at a volume just loud enough to be noticeable. The scent of pine and cinnamon hung in the air, probably from a festive candle or diffuser. Even the water bottles had little snowflake stickers on them.
It was aggressively, relentlessly, suffocatingly cheerful.
Cole's jaw tightened. He'd spent the last Christmas alone in a hotel room, avoiding his phone, pretending December 25th was just another day. He'd managed to make it through the entire holiday season without acknowledging it existed.
Evergreen Cove was clearly not going to let him do that again.
And then the door behind him opened, and Cole turned.
His brain stuttered.
She wasn't what he'd expected.
Shorter than him—but everyone was shorter than him, so that didn't mean much. Maybe five-five in the sneakers she was wearing. But there was nothing small about her presence. She filled the doorway like she owned it, shoulders back, chin up, meeting his eyes with the kind of direct assessment that made him feel like she could see straight through to all the broken parts he was hiding.
Auburn hair pulled back in a high ponytail, though curls were already escaping around her face. Warm brown eyes that were currently giving him a once-over that felt less like a greeting and more like an X-ray. Freckles scattered across her nose and cheeks. Athletic build in black pants and an Eagles polo that somehow managed to be both completely professional and distracting in ways Cole absolutely was not going to think about.
And on her collar, catching the light: a small enamel pin shaped like a reindeer wearing a Santa hat.
