Page 298 of Coach
It was too much. I couldn’t take it.
“Anyway, I just wanted to say hi. He says great things about you, too, by the way.”
As Gabe stood, I reached out and grabbed his wrist.
“Gabe.” My voice broke. “Thanks.”
His smile was electric . . . and then he was gone, mingled back into the mass of players and parents around a table littered with empty pizza trays and a centerpiece composed of one lone, very proud trophy.
It turned out that a school year could teach a great deal more than history, mathematics, social studies, and economics. It taught kids how to interact, how to engage, how not to tear each other apart when hormones and teenage foolishness collided.
It also taught the teachers—and those around them—lessons they couldn’t ignore.
I missed him.
God, I missed Mateo.
Which was stupid, because it wasn’t as though he’d moved across the country, but I missed Mateo like I’d lost a limb—like something that was supposed to be part of me had just . . . vanished.
When school started back after the holidays, the pace picked up fast.
For Mateo, anyway.
Basketball swallowed his time with practices, scouting reports, game film, and a million bus rides to rival schools in the middle of nowhere. Tuesday, Friday, Saturday, there was always a game. The other days were practice, prep, or recovery. I saw him when I could. We ate quick dinners, stole a few hourstogether. Some nights he slept over, but more and more, it was just me, alone, staring at my phone and rereading old texts like some teenager in a melodrama.
Sometimes I’d catch myself staring at Mateo—just watching him laugh or tilt his head when he was trying to figure something out—and I’d feel this pang in my chest. Like . . . how the hell did I get him? How did this bright, funny, relentless man with a crooked smile and a heart the size of Texas end up in my orbit?
He deserved someone light, someone who didn’t carry around the weight of childhood silences or the scars left by people who never saw him for who he really was. Mateo deserved someone who could let go, laugh as easily as he did, someone who wasn’t still trying to unlearn the idea that love had to be earned with sweat and quiet suffering.
And I—hell, I didn’t know if I was that guy.
I didn’t know if I could become that guy.
I wanted to be.
God, I wanted to be.
I wanted to hand him a key and say, “Make this your home, too.”
I wanted to wake up to the sound of his ridiculous humming, to his hair sticking up in every direction. I wanted to fold his laundry next to mine, buy milkfor two, argue about where the spare socks go.
But deep down, I couldn’t stop wondering: What if I mess it up? What if I love him with everything I have, and it’s still not enough? What if I’m too heavy, too stubborn, too broken in ways he hasn’t seen yet?
What if I let him in, and he realizes I’m not worth staying for?
And yet—I still wanted him.
Every hour of every day.
Even if I didn’t know whether I could make him happy.
I’d go out to the shop to work but would find myself sanding the same damn table leg for twenty minutes, zoning out as my mind wandered to Mateo’s curls and that one freckle just beneath his left collarbone. I’d remember the way he smiled when he was trying not to—when he thought he had to be serious, but I cracked some deadpan joke, and his whole face lit up like it couldn’t help itself.
Even in the shower, I couldn’t escape him. I’d close my eyes and he’d be there, hot water cascading down my back as I remembered the sound he made when I kissed the underside of his jaw, or how he whispered my name when I was inside him. I’d get hard in seconds, one hand braced against the tile, the other . . . handling business.
But it wasn’t lust, not really.
Not only.
