Page 75 of Sexting the Coach
I can see that there’s something she’s keeping to herself. I just don’t know what it is.
“You need togo,” she repeats, urgently, desperately, her head still turned. Her shoulders are starting to shake, those tears running down her face again.
“Tell me you don’t feel this, too?—”
“I don’t?—”
“Look me in the eye,” I growl, hands itching to reach out and touch her, to convince her that whatever it is she’s feeling, she can share it with me.
But maybe that’snotthe case at all.
Maybe Elsie was just having some fun with an older guy. Maybe she was carrying on with this out of a sense of duty.
Maybe she’s felt sorry for me. Since I’m on the way down, after my injury, the highs of my career, my prime. Maybe this entire time, she’s been doing community fucking service.
“Look me in the eye,” I repeat, lowering my voice. “And tell me that you don’t feel this, too. And I’ll leave you alone. I’ll walk out that door and never come back. You won’t have to see my again.”
A little sob hiccups up and out of her chest, and I step forward to take her in my arms. It’s maddening, seeing her like this, and knowing she won’t let me close enough to help.
Then, rolling her lip into her mouth and sucking in a deep breath, she turns to me, wiping the tears roughly from her face and saying in a completely even tone, “I don’t feelanything, Weston. This was a fake arrangement from the start. And I’m sorry if I ever made you think it was something else.”
It feels like anthrax right in the middle of my fucking heart. Sticky and spreading, moving throughout my body, poisoning me from the inside out.
I’m an asshole, and for a long time, I’ve only seen the worst parts of life. Elsie helped to change that. She—as fucking cliche as it is—brought in a ray of sunshine that followed me throughout the day. Being with her felt like hope. It felt like the future was mine again, like it was something I was allowed to hope for.
I should have known better than to get my hopes up.
Swallowing down the bile in my throat, I nod, turn, blindly walk toward the door. My vision is dark, pulsing with the reality of the fact that this ishappening. I told her I would walk out of her life, and I’m going to do it.
Even though when I close her door behind me, when I step into the elevator, when I walk past the doorman and out onto the street, it eats me up.
I’ll keep my promise to her, even if it fucking kills me.
Chapter 33
Elsie
After all this time flying, you’d think I’d be a little more comfortable with it.
Growing up, we were constantly in airports. For Dad’s games, then, after he retired, we took family vacations four times a year. When Drew had a hockey camp, we’d make a family trip out of it. My figure skating camps were the same.
And, in the past year with the Squids, serving as PT staff for the games, I’ve been on planes plenty. But, still, the taxi to the runway and that initial, impossible lift up off the tarmac makes my body ramp up with adrenaline.
It doesn’t help that pregnancy hormones are running through me. In fact, that’s what I’m going to blame the crying on. The incessant, nonstop crying, even when I went through security and then checked into the airport lounge. Thankfully, people were kind enough to pretend they didn’t see it, other than the lounge associate, who wordlessly passed me a little packet of tissues that I’ve already blown through.
The plane lifts up into the sky, and some of my anxiety ebbs, so I get to work drafting my apologies to Hattie and Mabel. They made me promise to wait before making any sudden decisions,to not flee San Francisco because of what happened with Weston.
We talked for hours, and I cried for hours, then they tucked me into bed and Mabel promised I would feel better after breakfast in the morning. I stayed in bed for a few hours, then got up when it was time to pack.
I’d already booked my flight out.
But I had to.
First, because the city feels like a scrapbook to our non-relationship. And second, because the idea of running into him on the street is far, far too appealing. In fact, the idea of dropping everything and going to him, telling him the truth—that I didn’t mean it when I said I didn’t want him—ran through my mind as a possibility every few seconds.
Maybe because I know that if I see him again, I’m going to come clean. Tell him the truth about the reason I fell like I can’t be with him. And if I do that, he’s going to involve himself with this baby, even though it’s not what he wants.
The plane lands in Denver three hours later, and I haven’t managed a single second of sleep. In the aisle across from me, a baby babbles happily in a mother’s lap. The first baby I’ve ever seen on a plane, not bothered by the change in pressure, the elevation.
