Page 167 of Coach
He’d bolt out the door.
Guys like him always did.
Tall guys with perfect lips and sculpted abs and arms for days.
They were all assholes. They had to be.
I pressed the sandpaper harder, feeling the grit bite into the wood—and into me.
“Stupid,” I muttered, tossing the paper down hard enough it slid off the edge of the bench.
It wasn’t like he was thinking about me, wasn’t like he would even know what to do with a guy like me. Hell, I barely knew what to do with myself most of the time.
Besides.
That smile? That voice? That immaculate hair that somehow shifted from black to midnight blue in the setting sunlight?
He belonged somewhere bigger than a dusty old workshop filled with half-finished dreams and broken hopes.
I reached for a fresh sheet of sandpaper, flexing it once between my hands.
Work first.
Always work first.
The wood didn’t lie.
It didn’t flirt.
It didn’t promise things it didn’t mean.
Still . . .
I rubbed the curve of the piece again, tracing the dip with my thumb, and somewhere in the back of my mind, Mateo’s voice teased me, his damn accent, the clumsy way he’d said “sideboard” like it was something sacred, like he was embarrassed just standing there.
I huffed out a breath and grabbed the file again.
“Focus. I need to focus,” I muttered.
The wood needed shaping.
The work needed doing.
And the Italian?
He needed to stop smiling in my head.
Chapter 5
Mateo
The teacher’s lounge at Mount Vernon High smelled like burned coffee and whatever someone had microwaved and then abandoned last week that was now possibly evolving into sentience. Mike and I had commandeered the one halfway-clean table near the window, unwrapping our lunches like we were about to perform surgery instead of survive another Monday afternoon.
“So,” Mike said, pointing at me with a limp carrot stick, “one of my kids today asked if ‘abs’ were a real muscle group or just something you downloaded on TikTok. You’re an athlete. What say you?”
I choked on my water. “Please tell me you said yes and assigned a ten-page research paper.”
“Tempting,” he said. “Instead, I made them do planks until they questioned all their life choices.”
