Page 47 of Coach
Behind me, someone hit the floor with a muffled thud.
Another one down.
I didn’t look back.
“Team bonding,” I muttered to myself. “Mutual suffering. It builds character . . . and stamina.”
We’d need plenty of both when there were refs and fans and a live scoreboard.
And as much as I didn’t want to admit having a fixation, torturing cocky, if talented, teens was a pretty effective distraction from tall, scruffy, emotionally repressed lumberjacks who somehow made eye contact feel like a religious experience.
Fucking focus, Ricci! You have kids dry heaving and swearing at your ancestors. Do NOT daydream about tank tops and wood shavings.
I rubbed the back of my neck and scowled at my clipboard like it owed me money.
I was fine.
I wastotallyfine.
There’s no way I was fawning over a man who used five-word sentences like they were high-risk investments.
I glanced up at the team. Most of them were upright. A few were still alive.
I blew the whistle again just to assert dominance.
“Five-minute break. Get water and sit.”
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.
