Page 202 of Coach
The instant my stopwatch clicked, I said, “That’s time, gentlemen. Let’s go! Baseline to baseline! You stop when I say stop—or when you collapse. Whichever comes first!”
Thirty minutes later, the last of the kids, a freshman, braced himself on the shoulder of one of the juniors as the pair vanished through the door that led to our locker room. There wasn’t enough money in all the world to entice me to go back there then. There were a dozen angry, exhausted, malodorous boys stripping down and likely tossing their soiled, sweaty clothes at one another. The entire world was safer on the gym side of that door.
I certainly was.
I leaned back against the wall, letting the whistle fall from my mouth. I wasn’t thinking about drills anymore. Or court spacing. Or footwork.
I was thinking about Shane.
And not in the casual, fleeting, oh-he’s-hot way.
No, I’d sprinted past that intersection and was now firmly in dangerous emotional territory. It was the kind of headspace where I started wondering how his laugh would sound if he ever let go, what he’d look like first thing in the morning, whether he built furniture to keep people out or to say things he didn’t know how to say.
Which was insane.
We’d had one date.
One.
And yet there I was—sweaty, clipboard in hand, abandoned by vomiting teens—trying to remember the exact curve of his lips when he said my name.
I was certain this wasn’t just attraction. It wasn’t just lust, though, lord help me, that tank top was a war crime unto itself. No, these thoughts, these feelings, were something quieter, something steadier—which was funny because everything about them made me feel about as unsteady as I ever had.
Why did life have to be so confusing?
These feelings, these flashes of memories and hopes of more . . . they felt like something that settled behind my ribs and refused to leave, like a favorite song stuck on repeat.
It was the last thing I wanted to admit, but if I was honest with myself, I liked him.
More than I should.
More than made sense.
And for the first time in a long time, that didn’t scare me as much as it should’ve.
Okay, it didn’t scare me like it should actually scare me, more than if I’d been scared in the first place.
Shit.
I was babbling in my own head.
This was bad.
This was so incredibly, painfully, horribly—wonderfully—bad.
And yet . . .
The part that gnawed at me more than anything—the part I didn’t want to say out loud because that might give it more power—wasn’t just admitting that I liked him.
It wasn’t even the teenage angst of wondering if he liked me back.
It was wondering whether or not hecouldlike me back.
And I wasn’t thinking about the surface-level kind of liking, either—not attraction or flirting or appreciating a decent set of forearms, though he seemed to do that just fine. No, I meant the real stuff, the messy, warm, terrifying parts of someone that got under your skin and refused to leave.
I didn’t know . . . I wasn’t sure . . . if Shanecouldgo there.
Not because he didn’t want to.
