Page 59 of Ready to Score

“Move back, David,” she said, opening the door and hopping out, then grabbing her water bottle and canvas bag before slamming the car door shut. “I was just running a little behind.”

The duo started to walk toward the field together, and Jade wasn’t sure which one was keeping with the stride of the other. David had boundless energy, and he was a little on the small side, which made him one of their better running backs.

He took off like a rocket the second he touched the edge of the field, and Jade’s heart started pounding just as fast. Everything looked completely normal. The boys sitting around, talking on the field. Coaches on the sidelines doing the same. Landry was in a small huddle with a group of parents. Immediately, Jade feared that he was telling them what she had done—letting them know that their kids had been coached by a goddamn fool.

She shook her head. That was ridiculous. As much as she feared him right now, Landry would never do something like that.

Her steps toward the sideline weren’t as sure as they normally were, but the greetings everyone—or almost everyone—gave her seemed to be.

Lim was there too, hip cocked against the giant orange Gatorade cooler as she downed a cup. Jade drifted toward the other woman as if she were a buoy adrift at sea.

“Hi,” she choked out.

Lim made something of a grimace, all clenched teeth and pitiful eyes. “You look…”

“Yeah,” Jade groaned, pulling the bill of her visor farther down over her face. “Sleep is for people who aren’t about to get fired.”

“He wouldn’t let you come just to fire you, Jade.”

“You don’t know what he’d do.”

Lim sighed and pulled away from the cooler. “Look,” she said as she tossed a casual arm around Jade’s shoulders, doing nothing to ease her pounding heart, and spun her in the direction of the field. “It’s a beautiful day, the kids are happy, and you have not lost your job.” She leaned in closer until Jade could feel her warm breath against her ear. “But if you hang around here like some kind of specter of sadness, you might. The only thing you can do now is make him remember how indispensable you are. So you might as well do just that. Don’t accept your fears as truths.”

Jade couldn’t help but look at the woman. Her full, peachy lips and the little Cindy Crawford mole just above them. The way her dark eyes never seemed to display anything other than playfulness. She was too beautiful to look at for too long, but fuck if Jade didn’t want to test the boundaries of those limits.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked once she finally dragged her gaze back to the field. “You should be over there trying to wiggle your way in.”

“One-sided competition, remember?” Lim shrugged. “Maybe I’m just playing the role of kingmaker. They’re the ones who actually have all the power anyway.”

“Ugh.” Jade shoved the other woman away, ignoring her laughs as she found a spot to put her things down and steeling herself for the coming hours.

Lim was right, damn her. The only thing she could do now was show Landry—remind him—that she was his first choice for a reason. Mistakes be damned. She was it. She had to be.

She just had to remind herself too.

Landry managed to go the entire practice without speaking to her. He’d even only looked her way a handful of times, and Jade wasn’t positive those hadn’t been accidents.

The silence felt like a snub. Even when she’d been a child, her parents had never punished her by ignoring her. It felt impossible not to let such a thing cloud her mind and shake her already fragile confidence.

Thankfully, Landry had the boys running laps for a good portion of practice. Hot as it was, they’d also taken a lot of water breaks. So she’d been given only about thirty minutes to run D-line drills before they’d called it a day. Seconds after he’d blown the whistlesignaling the end of practice, Landry had disappeared inside the school—presumably to his office. Jade had watched him walk, tall but with his shoulders drawn, and fought back every instinct inside herself that told her to follow him. Instead, she’d gathered her things and made her way back to her truck—the only thing on her mind being whether she should go cry in her mother’s lap again or go home and cry into a pint of pistachio ice cream.

But the truck wouldn’t start.

“This is not happening.” She turned her key and listened as the ignition made a pitiful sound for the third time in a row. “There is no way this is actually happening to me right now.”

She paused and took a deep breath, rolling her shoulders and giving her lips a once-over with her tongue. Then she tried again. “Gladys, baby, please. Just… please…”

Once again, that pitiful sound.

Gladys was a 1984 Chevy Silverado. At one point, she’d been a glossy cobalt blue; now she was much duller, with more parts of her replaced than Jade could count. It had been her father’s truck, and for the first few years of her life, it had been her favorite place to be. Riding down country dirt roads in the bed with her cousins or strapped into the cab with wind whipping through the windows and Curtis Mayfield on the radio. Her father had given it to her when she’d turned seventeen, and Gladys had been with her ever since.

Jade had sunk more money into the old girl than she cared to admit, but she’d never been strong enough to let her go, not even when Gladys had more than three hundred thousand miles on her and an affinity for being finicky as all hell.

She didn’t know shit about cars, so there was no fixing Gladys on her own. Instead, she’d have to do what she always did and call one of her friends to pick her up. Which always included listening tothem lecture her about how dangerous it was for her to still be driving “that raggedy-ass truck.” She didn’t want to hear it. She didn’t want to hear anything but that engine finally turning over.

And it wouldn’t, no matter how much begging she did as she turned the key.

Jade pressed her head against the steering wheel, teeth gritted, jaw hurting from the way she clenched it. She was so caught up in her own mess that the tap on her window didn’t even faze her.

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