The shoulder had been talking to him for weeks. Not screaming — Nolan would've done something about screaming, probably, maybe, if he was in a generous mood toward himself, which he generally wasn't. It had started as this low, background ache after the 200 free sets, the kind of thing you could talk yourself out of if you were good at talking yourself out of things.

He was extremely good at talking himself out of things.

So he iced it sometimes. Popped ibuprofen like it was a Tic Tac. Told the athletic trainer it was "fine, just tight," which was a lie he'd gotten so smooth at telling that he'd almost started believing it himself. He had a system. The system worked. The system had worked since he was fourteen years old and figured out that pain was just information, and information could be ignored if you were disciplined enough about it. Discipline was the one thing nobody could ever accuse him of not having.

Tuesday practice, main set, and he went to pull through the water on stroke forty-something of a set he'd stopped counting somewhere around thirty, and his shoulder just — stopped. Not hurt, exactly. Worse than hurt. Stopped, like his own arm had unionized and gone on strike without warning.

He came up gasping, but not from the effort.

"Raines?" Coach Martinez, deck side, already moving toward him.

"I'm good," Nolan said, automatic, the reflex faster than the truth. He tried to lift his arm to prove it.

He could not lift his arm.

Not wouldn't. Couldn't. There was a very clear, very unpleasant difference, and his whole body had just discovered it in front of the entire team, in the middle of a Tuesday, under fluorescent lights that made everything look worse than it probably was.

"Yeah, that's — okay, out of the water. Now."

He got out of the water, and he didn't tell her. That was the part that made sense to him at the time, in the dumb, self-protective logic he ran on — she had a paper due, she'd mentioned it twice this week, unprompted, the way people mention things when they're stressed and trying not to make it your problem. And it was probably nothing. Overuse, tendinitis, the trainer's best guess before the MRI. He didn't want to be a whole thing. Didn't want to be the guy who texted his — whatever she was, not so friend, the person he built entire days around — hey my shoulder's fucked like it was a crisis, when it was just Tuesday, just his body doing what his body always eventually did, which was quietly fail him in exchange for everything he asked of it.

So he went home. Iced it himself, badly, sitting on the edge of his bed with a bag of frozen peas Hunter definitely wanted back for actual food purposes. Watched something on his phone he didn't absorb a single second of. Told Hunter and Marcus he was fine, which they didn't buy, but let him have anyway, because that was the deal in this apartment — you didn't push until pushing became necessary.

He did not text her. Almost. Opened the thread four separate times, thumb hovering, and each time some old, tired part of his brain — the part that had learned a long time ago that needing things out loud got you left — talked him back down. It's fine. It's not a big deal. Don't make it a thing.

Marcus told her. Not maliciously — just mentioned it in a group chat that Nolan wasn't paying attention to, some offhand bro's shoulder looked bad today that he probably didn't think twice about sending.

She showed up at his apartment forty minutes later.

He heard the knock and knew, somehow, before he even opened the door, in that specific way his body had learned to recognize the difference between her knock and everyone else's — which was insane, objectively, knocks didn't have personalities, except hers definitely did, quick and a little impatient, like she'd been standing there working herself up the whole elevator ride.

He opened the door. She did not look worried. She looked furious.