Page 307 of Coach
“We’re going,” I told him Thursday night. “Bags are packed. Car’s full. You’ve got the weekend off, and I’ve already warned Stevie to lie if you try to call her to talk me out of it.”
He glared.
I kissed his cheek.
He didn’t glare quite as hard after that.
The drive out of town was quiet for the first half hour, nothing but highway and low-volume indie music. Eventually, he reached over and laced our fingers together.
The bed-and-breakfast sat on the edge of a vineyard that looked like it belonged on a postcard with its old stone walls, wisteria crawling up the porch columns, and a wraparound veranda with enough rocking chairs to host a Baptist church social. The room they gave us smelled like lavender and lemon furniture polish, with thick quilts on the bed and a fireplace I planned to light the second the sun went down.
Mateo stood in the center of the room, looking like he didn’t know what to do with all the peace.
“This is . . . nice,” he said, then exhaled like he hadn’t breathed in days.
I stepped up behind him and wrapped my arms around his waist. “Love you.”
His head fell back against my shoulder. “Sorry I’m in a funk. I thought this was our year. I wanted it . . . for the kids . . . you know?”
I knew the feeling—at least, I knew it from a player’s perspective. My high school football team hadbeen amazing, winning State and State, year after year. My senior year, we were ranked number one in the whole damn country.
And we’d lost in the second round of the District Tourney to a no-name team who hadn’t won more than three games in two seasons. Losing sucked. There was no way around it. But losing when you were supposed to win? Beating yourself? That was beyond any level of sucking possible. Ask any athlete; they’ll tell you the same. I suspected it was no different for coaches.
“I just hate it for kids like Gabe. He’s graduating this year. This was his last shot at a title.”
We hung out in our room for a while, Mateo flipping mindlessly through TV channels neither of us cared anything about, and me pretending to read a book someone had left on the nightstand. It was a romance, of all things. When I got to a sex scene in which the author described the sexual act with the man mimicking a parent feeding a child, complete with, “Open wide for the choo-choo,” I couldn’t take it anymore and tossed it aside.
“This is a vineyard,” I said, not exactly an earth-shattering pronouncement.
“And?” Mateo cocked a brow.
“We should be drinking wine.”
“Tasting,” he corrected.
“Tasting with swallowing, a little like—”
Mateo coughed a laugh. “Let’s go taste some wine before you get us both into trouble.”
“Trouble was Plan B, but wine works.” I shrugged and checked my watch.
“Got somewhere else to be?” he asked through a smirk as we approached the door.
“With you and old grapes. Nowhere else.”
“A perfect afternoon.” Mateo grinned. “After you, good sir.”
We strode down the narrow halls of the bed-and-breakfast, a building likely erected in the early part of the twentieth century, to step into a sprawling room that was only separated from the rows of grapes outside by a massive window wall. It looked as though we could step directly off the living room floor onto the rich dirt of the vineyard.
“We need a window wall,” Mateo said.
“Nah. I’ll take a TV that size. You can have the window.”
Mateo shook his head but grinned. Already, his mood was lifting.
When Sisi stepped into the room, his grin fell into a curious gaze.
“Sierra?” he asked, using her full name, something he rarely did.
