Page 18 of Her Coach

7

COLTON

I had planned to have one drink.

That was the plan when I walked in. One drink, meet the team on neutral ground, establish that I was the kind of coach who showed up and didn't just bark from behind a clipboard, then go home. Simple. In and out. I had a schedule to finish and six weeks before the season opened and zero reason to be sitting at a bar in Las Vegas at eleven at night nursing a Coke.

And yet.

She remembered everything. That was the thing I kept coming back to. Not just drinks: she knew Mikey was pacing himself before he asked, knew Rhett was going to reach for the bar mix before he moved, knew which guys needed checking on and which ones just needed to be left alone. She ran that bar the way a good coach ran a bench. Nothing wasted. Nothing missed.

I had no business noticing any of that.

Rhett appeared at my elbow and helped himself to the stool beside me. I let him.

"Hell of an introduction," he said.

"Was it?"

He picked up his drink. "Moose asking about the meal plan within thirty seconds. That's a new record."

The corner of my mouth moved. "I'll keep that in mind."

He took a pull. Didn't say anything for a moment. Then, casual enough that it wasn't casual at all: "Victoria make it out tonight?"

I looked at him. "Not that I've seen."

He nodded once and went back to his drink. Didn't push it. Didn't explain it. Just let it sit there and moved on, which was either very polite or very practiced and I hadn't decided which yet.

I didn't ask why he cared if the team's owner had left for the night. But I thought about it. Rhett was the kind of man who chose his words deliberately and didn't waste them on small talk. Which meant that question wasn't small talk. I left it alone for now.

The bar was loud in the way that bars got loud when a group of athletes descended on them, big voices, big gestures, the collective energy of men who had worked their bodies hard and needed somewhere to put what was left over. I had been in a hundred bars like this one over twenty years. I had been the young one making the noise and the older one tolerating it and everywhere in between.

This felt different. I couldn't put my finger on the specific reason and I was self-aware enough to know that was information.

She was back in front of me before I registered she'd moved.

"Another?" She nodded at my glass.

"I'm fine."

She leaned on the bar on both forearms and looked at me for a second. Not sizing me up exactly. More like she'd already done that and was checking her math. Up close she had a small smudge of something — lime juice maybe, or just the residue of a long shift — on the inside of her left wrist, and I had absolutely no reason to notice that and yet here we were.

"You know," she said, "for a man who just moved to a new city and took over a team that hasn't won a playoff series in four years, you're remarkably calm."

"Would you prefer I wasn't?"

"Personally? No. The guys?" She tilted her head toward the team. "They're watching you. They want to know if you're real or if you're just good at seeming real."

I looked at her. "Which do you think?"

She held my gaze for a moment. Long enough that I knew she had an answer and was deciding whether to give it to me. "I think you already know the answer to that and you're asking me anyway."

"Maybe I want to hear you say it."

Something shifted in her expression. Not much. Just enough. She pushed off the bar. "Ask me again at the end of the season." She reached for a glass and moved down the bar without looking back.

I watched her go for a second longer than I should have.