Page 109 of Coach
And moved.
And moved.
Each time, I got smarter, more careful.
Each time, he kept tracking me down.
With each move, life got harder, money got shorter in supply. It wasn’t long before I was offsetting costs by living in my car. Which created its own new world of difficulty and terror. Strange men at my windows. Where to go when my car needed repairs. Showers in public rest stops.
Until one night, I woke up with a familiar face near my window, his hand in his pants.
I nearly backed over him in my desperation to drive off.
Many times over the years, across different cities, never able to shake that shadow, I wondered if it would have been better if I had.
Ran over him.
Backed up.
And ran over him again.
Because he only got bolder with each city he followed me to.
There was no more standing under streetlights. He simply broke into my homes. He placed cameras. He left presents. He waited for me.
Once, when I went nearly ten months without a visit from my old coach, I started to think it was finally, finally over.
Until the man I’d been dating for a few weeks had his brake lines fail and wrapped himself around a tree.
He lived, thank God.
But the cops wouldn’t believe me when I told them who cut the lines. Especially since I had yet to lay eyes on Coach Dover in the area. Within a few days, the boyfriend started telling me I was being crazy and paranoid, that sometimes brake lines failed.
He almost had me second-guessing myself as well, thinking I was truly starting to crack under the pressure.
Until finally, fresh off a breakup with that same guy, he showed his face, grabbing me as I made my way toward my apartment, pinning me to the wall, talking rapid-fire craziness at me, his spit coating my face, his fingers bruising my skin.
Luckily, a nosy neighbor was taking her big German Shepherd out for a walk. Her yelling and the dog’s snarling managed to scare off my coach.
“You need one of these,” my neighbor said, patting her dog’s head. “They keep the creeps away.”
I packed up once again.
But on my way out of town, I stopped by a shelter, lied about my living situation, and walked out with a man-hating dog who could hopefully keep one particular creep away.
I had one last run-in with Coach Dover after bringing Trix into my life.
She’d done exactly what I hoped she would.
She barked, lunged, snarled, snapped, foamed at the mouth.
Coach Dover was quick to back away, panic filling his eyes.
It was the first time I felt like I had the upper hand, that I had a little bit of power.
That lack of panic allowed me to think clearly for a change, to try to consider how the hell he’d been tracking me.
At first, I assumed it was my socials. Until I deactivated them. Then maybe my phone. So I got rid of it. After that, I imagined he had somehow hacked into some sort of database for employment records.
