"Are you okay Hannah?" John had come out to greet Hannah and her family when they returned from the track meet.
"Eventually." Hannah grumbled as she slid out of the van. She hissed as her weight irritated her injury. John was at her side before her parents, offering his arm for support. "Thanks." Hannah kept as much weight off her leg as she could as they made their way inside.
"If you don't want to see, leave now." Hannah bent over her leg, fingers poised to remove the gauze as her mother brought the supplies over. John didn't move.
Round and round her hands went slowly revealing the long scrape on the outside of her right calf. Some of the dark red scabs came away with the gauze. It was recent enough nothing had fully hardened, and there were small spots where a white pus oozed from the injury. Hannah glanced over as she finished removing the wrapping; John's eyes were huge.
"I'll be seeing my doctor tomorrow." Hannah spoke quietly. "And I saw one immediately after the injury."
"That looks-"
"It looks worse than it is." Hannah insisted, though the tears she had shed limping back to her team's bench would have argued otherwise.
"That girl should have known better." Hannah's mother muttered as she knelt down next to Hannah. "Running in your lane during the hand off of the relay."
"Mom." Hannah waved her hands and took the rest of the supplies. "I can handle this." After a long look Hannah's mother departed.
"Wait, you said you guys got second in the relay..." John sat on Hannah's right. "And you are the anchor... You ran on that!"
Hannah grinned. "I'm a competitor John. No little scrape is going to stop me."
"That's not so little." John mumbled, awed more than anything.
"It's fine. The scouts saw that I'm no quitter." Hannah fished a couple business cards out of her shorts and handed them to John before she set to work cleaning her calf.
"You talked with five scouts?" Hannah glanced up in time to see John raise an eyebrow at her. "Let me guess, before you even went to see a doctor?"
"You know me so well." Hannah grinned. John only rolled his eyes and went back to flipping through the cards. She watched for a moment, seeing the corners of his lips start to tug down. Hannah chose to distract her boyfriend with talk of other things. The future was too heavy of a topic when her leg was stinging.
Word count: 468
